Billionaire Jared Isaacman to become first civilian to take spacewalk, thanks to Elon Musk and SpaceX

This 41-year-old entrepreneur, with an accumulated fortune of more than 1.8 billion dollars (according to Forbes), is used to making history. First through his company Shift4, which now manages more than $200 billion in payments per year for a third of restaurants and hotels in the United States. But also breaking the speed record by flying around the world in a light aircraft in less than 62 hours, recovering fighter jets or leading Inspiration4, the world’s first civilian mission into orbit, launched by SpaceX in 2021.

Today, as mission commander of Polaris Dawn and along with his three other crew members, will reach a distance of 1,400 km from Earthfarther than any human has flown in the last 52 years, since the last Apollo missions. If all goes according to plan, he will also be the first civilian, alongside Sarah Gillis. —SpaceX Mission Specialist—by carrying out a commercial space walk.

Although his money was essential to the mission’s launch (an undisclosed amount paid half-and-half with SpaceX), Isaacman knows he couldn’t have done it alone.and his two and a half years of training bear witness to this. His first words from Earth orbit were thanks.

“We wouldn’t be doing this trip without you, 14,000 at home [en referencia a los trabajadores de SpaceX] and all of you cheering us on,” he radioed SpaceX Mission Control.Thank you. Now let’s get to work.“.

Who is Jared Isaacman

THE epic of the self-made man It has deep roots in the United States. In fact, many current leaders of technology companies, such as Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk himself, use this founding myth of American society to enhance their image. In the case of Jared Isaacman, it is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Like other tech leaders, his story began in a basement (rather than a garage) of his parents’ house in Far Hills, New Jersey. After drop out of high school at 15Isaacman founded United Bank Card (UBC) in 1999 and began calling himself CEO of the company.

He was convinced that he had struck gold and that he would soon become a money-making machine. So, It took companies a month to install an electronic payment systemin addition to having to pay for their credit card readers and go through complex bureaucratic procedures with the bank.

As an alternative, Isaacman’s proposal was to reduce the installation time to just one day, offer merchants free credit card readers after filling out a two-page application. The initial team for this business venture consisted of him, his father and his closest friends, with an initial capital of $10,000 provided by his grandfather.

Quiet at first, but quickly consolidating its position, UBC caught the magazine’s attention. Inc.making it one of the fastest growing small businesses in North America. The same message ranked Isaacman just behind Zuckerberg on its list of America’s top 30 businessmen under 30 years old.

UBC continued to evolve. Became Harbortouch for the first time and later in Shift4 Payments, although Isaacman left his position as CEO in 2015while the company had already been “profitable for over a decade, processing $11 billion annually from 60,000 merchants, generating $300 million in revenue.”

NOW owns 38% of shares in tech giant Shift4 which integrates payment processing services on various hardware and software products, including in the restaurant, hospitality, retail and e-commerce sectors.

Passion for the sky

Alongside his corporate job, Jared Isaacman has been dreaming of reaching the stars since he was a little boy. And what was the fastest way to get there? Become an experienced airplane pilot. In 2005, at the age of 22, this self-proclaimed “space geek” began teaching classes to earn his pilot’s license.

Since Isaacman always does things big, it wasn’t enough for him to fly small planes. His thing is fighter jets and aerobatics, which is why he became a member of the Black Diamond Jet Team and Heavy Metal Jets, teams with which he has performed up to 75 annual air shows for over 15 years. With these squadrons he can fly at over 600 km/h, with the wings at a distance of less than 50 cm.

Soon after he first flew a plane, Isaacman began collecting all types of military aircraft, including the only Russian Mig-29 owned by an American. While he uses a Cessna III 650 and a Beechcraft Baron for professional travel, his particular air fleet (the world’s largest private air force) helped him found Draken International in 2012, a Florida-based company that trains pilots for the U.S. Armed Forces.

In all accumulates over 7,000 hours of flight experience in aviationincluding evaluations on several experimental and ex-military aircraft. One of his greatest achievements is the world record for circumnavigating the globe in a light aircraft, which he achieved on his second attempt in 2009. He set a time of 61 hours and 51 minutes, 20 hours less than the previous record. To do this, he flew a Cessna Citation CJ2 with two other crew members.

During these years, Isaacman added to his resume an increasingly active philanthropic vein. In fact, the air shows, world record and their space missions have served to raise money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation and St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis.

After conquering the heavens, he still had the stars. In 2008 traveled to Kazakhstan to see a Russian Soyuz take off with one of the first space tourists on board. As SpaceX began to take the lead in the industry, Isaacman saw clearly that Musk was opening the doors to space for him: He was invited to watch from mission control the company’s second launch of an astronaut for NASA.

Thus was born the possibility of ordering the Inspiration4 mission, which made a three-day journey into spacetraveling at a speed of 28,160 kilometers per hour. At that time, the Dragon capsule reached an altitude of about 575 kilometers from Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.

At the time, Isaacman He would not reveal how much he paid SpaceX to carry out the mission. (the “tickets” of the other businessmen on board also came out of his pocket), but he managed to collect up to $250 million in donations for St. Jude Hospital. Of this large sum, $100 million came from his own checking account and $50 million from Elon Musk’s.

What will the spacewalk be like?

Polaris Dawn is another step, and particularly important for the future manned voyages of the Starship to Mars, which Elon Musk himself plans for 2028. One of the keys to this mission will be the first commercial spacewalk in historyscheduled for Thursday 12, once the crew has completed the depressurization process of the Dragon capsule.

At this point, Isaacman and SpaceX mission specialist Sarah Gillis will briefly emerge from the hatch in turn. They won’t go far. The two They will always have one hand or foot in contact with the capsule or with the support structure, similar to a swimming pool ladder, since the new suits do not have thrusters in case of emergency.

One of the goals is to test the new SpaceX suits. “During the spacewalk, the astronauts will perform a series of tests that will provide the data needed to will enable the SpaceX team to produce and evolve for future long-duration missions“, Polaris emphasizes about the suit. The clothing and the process of depressurizing the cabin are the most delicate elements of the entire mission.

Meanwhile, pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and Anna Menon, another SpaceX engineer, will be in charge of supervising the spacewalk from inside. Like previous SpaceX astronaut flights, if all goes as planned The trip will end Saturday or Sunday with a safe landing on the Florida coast.. And then Jared Isaacman will smile again as he adds another notch to his long list of dreams come true.