The ad attracted $13 million in donations, and Isaacman added his own $100 million. He paid more than $5 million for a 30-second ad during last February’s Super Bowl to announce the Inspiration4 mission and raise funds for the hospital. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Long a supporter of multiple childhood charities (including the Make-a-Wish Foundation), Isaacman turned his attention this time to the St. Part of the answer, Isaacman decided, would be philanthropy. The question was how to select the three other people he ultimately chose to fly with him, all of whom TIME visited with this week at Cape Canaveral. One slot-the commander’s slot-would be his. Isaacman approached the company in January and bought four seats for an undisclosed sum. Will and wallet are not enough to secure yourself a seat aboard a NASA spacecraft, but SpaceX is a different matter-a private company under government contract to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station, but free to sell flight tickets to anyone it wants to in its spare time. Isaacman, the 37-year-old billionaire founder of online payment processing provider Shift4 payments, is a private pilot who always had a hankering to go to space. It was a fine system-one that gave us our Armstrongs and Aldrins and Grissoms and Glenns-but it was a decidedly exclusive one, too.Įarly this year, Jared Isaacman decided it was time to shake things up-and he was in a position to make it happen. Chances were it never would come, because chances were you wouldn’t be selected for training in the first place. NASA would periodically throw its doors open to new entrants, and you were more than welcome to apply-provided you were a military pilot or an engineer or a biologist or a physicist, of a certain age and a certain fitness and a certain temperament, and prepared to go through exhaustive training over the course of years before your turn finally came to fly. “But it’s now.”įrom the beginning, the American astronaut club was exceedingly undemocratic. “I thought a flight like this was a decade away,” says Proctor.
What it will be is the first flight aboard any spacecraft flown by any country or company to be crewed entirely by non-astronauts-four people who until this past February did not know they would be flying to space at all, and now will go to a place that fewer than 600 people in the world have ever gone before. The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, won’t be the first aboard a SpaceX ship to carry crew it won’t even be the second or the third. Come September, if all goes to plan, the 51-year-old professor of geoscience at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix will climb aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and rocket into low-Earth orbit, spending up to three days aloft before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.
Proctor herself has a lot to celebrate this year.
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