For His Second Trip to Space, Billionaire Has Grander, Riskier Aspirations

Kenneth Chang

Three years ago, a billionaire entrepreneur named Jared Isaacman made a groundbreaking trip to space. That spaceflight, which Isaacman called Inspiration4, was the first to orbit the Earth without a professional astronaut aboard. In the coming days, Isaacman, the founder and chief executive of Shift4, a payment processing company, is planning to head into space again. This time the itinerary is longer, more daring and riskier, and includes a spacewalk, the first by private astronauts.

The mission, named Polaris Dawn, hearkens back to the earliest era of spaceflight, the 1960s, when pioneers like Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union and John Glenn of NASA pushed the boundaries of what had been accomplished in space, learning how to survive and operate in an airless and weightless environment. But unlike those expeditions, undertaken by national space agencies, this is a purely commercial effort. For Polaris Dawn, Isaacman is collaborating closely with Elon Musk and his rocket company, SpaceX, to start laying the foundations for Musk’s dream of someday sending people to Mars.

“There’s always a risk calculus to it,” Isaacman said in an interview a week and a half ago, before he and his three crewmates headed to Florida for the launch. “But the real focus is on what we stand to gain and learn from it. And in this case, we’ve got some pretty cool things.” Most astronaut missions these days are almost boringly routine, basically taxi rides ferrying people to and from an orbiting space station. The Polaris Dawn mission is not going to a space station. Instead, it is going farther than anyone has traveled since the Apollo 17 mission went to the moon in 1972.

“It’s time to explore,” William Gerstenmaier, a former NASA official who is now the vice president for build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said during a news conference on Aug. 19.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch a Crew Dragon capsule — the same spacecraft that takes NASA astronauts to the International Space Station, or I.S.S. — into an elliptical orbit that swings much farther away from Earth. The Polaris Dawn astronauts will pass through regions of intense radiation, and risk bombardment from tiny space rocks as well as bits of human-made debris that could puncture the spacecraft.

The upside of the journey is that it will test new technologies and gather data on the effects it has on the human body when people venture deeper into space. “This is a mission that sets out to accomplish a lot of things in a very short period,” Isaacman said. “We have some pretty ambitious objectives.” For this flight, SpaceX developed a new spacesuit to be used for the spacewalk, and will also try sending communications via laser pulses, instead of radio signals, between the Crew Dragon and SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of internet satellites.

On Tuesday evening, concerns about weather in areas where the returning spacecraft would splash down prompted SpaceX to cancel launch attempts on Wednesday and Thursday. The company said it would announce a future launch attempt when possible. That announcement followed an earlier delay so SpaceX could investigate a helium leak in the umbilical line that provides helium to the rocket.

While Isaacman led and financed Inspiration4 — he essentially chartered a flight using a Falcon 9 rocket and a Crew Dragon capsule from SpaceX — Polaris Dawn and two subsequent missions are, in Isaacman’s words, a “joint effort” between Isaacman and SpaceX. Isaacman declined to say how much he or SpaceX has spent. “We don’t ever get into the costs on all this,” he said. “I would just say that there is obviously a lot of contributions that are coming from SpaceX, and myself, in this.”

Two members of the Polaris Dawn crew are SpaceX employees: Anna Menon, a lead space operations engineer, and Sarah Gillis, who oversees astronaut training. The other two crew members are Isaacman and Scott Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force Pilot and longtime friend of Isaacman’s who served as the mission director on the ground during Inspiration4.

Polaris Dawn will travel farther from the planet that anyone since the Apollo moon landings ended more than 50 years ago. The first few orbits will pass through a dent in the Earth’s magnetic field known as the South Atlantic Anomaly; this magnetic weak spot allows high-energy charged particles from regions known as the Van Allen belts to come much closer to Earth’s surface. Within a few hours, the Polaris Dawn crew will receive a dose of radiation equivalent to what astronauts on the I.S.S. absorb in three months.

After the Crew Dragon completes about eight orbits, the spacecraft’s thrusters will fire to push the apogee, or farthest point of the orbit, to 870 miles above the planet.

That will be about 17 miles higher than the 853-mile altitude NASA astronauts Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon reached during the Gemini XI mission in 1966, still the record for astronauts on a spaceflight that did not head to the moon.