Is billionaire's 'risky' space flight about research or tourism?
- by THE WEEK
- Aug 29, 2024
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Jared Isaacman has spent "hundreds of millions of dollars to fly into space" in order to "expand the window" of who can become an astronaut
(Image credit: Jonathan Newton / The Washington Post / Getty Images) 29 August 2024
Jared Isaacman is about to go where no billionaire has gone before. The entrepreneur is making his second trip into space, this time a "longer, more daring and riskier" journey into high-earth orbit that will include a spacewalk, said The New York Times. The journey aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule will be a "purely commercial effort" featuring a crew of private-sector astronauts; NASA has nothing to do with this trip. But all involved say this is not just a sight-seeing jaunt. "The real focus is on what we stand to gain and learn from it," Isaacman said.
His trip is "the most ambitious — and risky — private spaceflight yet," said Scientific American. The so-called "Polaris Dawn" journey will launch into an "ultrahigh" orbit more than 800 miles high (where no human has flown since the Apollo moon missions) to the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the planet, in order to test the radiation's effect on humans. Later on, it will conduct the first-ever private spacewalk. The overriding aim to all this? To lay the groundwork for Elon Musk's planned trip to Mars. "It's time to go out," said SpaceX's Bill Gerstenmaier. "It's time to explore."
'Expanding human activity in space'
"When it comes to expanding human activity in space, Polaris Dawn is the real deal," Eric Berger said at Ars Technica. The flight will "push the ball of exploration forward" thanks to Isaacman, who has spent "hundreds of millions of dollars to fly into space" in order to "expand the window" of who can become an astronaut. The suits that Isaacman and another crew member will use on their spacewalk are the first generation of cheaper, leaner suits that will make it easier for future explorers to leave their spacecraft. That's useful. "It really is not a space tourism mission," said Berger.
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