The daredevil billionaire rocketed back into orbit on Tuesday, setting his sights on the first private spacewalk since NASA's Apollo moon landings and further venturing into the final frontier.
Unlike previous charter flights, this time tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman is sharing costs with SpaceX to also develop and test a new spacesuit to see how it will hold up in the harsh vacuum of space.
If all goes according to plan, it will be the first time a private citizen has performed a spacewalk, but he will not leave the capsule.
Considered one of the most dangerous parts of spaceflight, spacewalks have been the exclusive domain of professional astronauts since the Soviets opened the hatch in 1965, followed by the United States. Spacewalks are now routinely performed on the International Space Station.
Isaacman, along with two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn from Florida aboard SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, midway through the five-day flight.
But first, passengers will travel far beyond the International Space Station, to an altitude of 870 miles, surpassing the record for orbiting Earth set by NASA's Gemini program in 1966.
The only ones who have gone further than that were the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon.
The plan is to spend 10 hours at that extremely radiation-filled, debris-ridden altitude before cutting its elliptical orbit in half.
Even at this low altitude of 435 miles, the orbit would obscure the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest altitude ever flown by shuttle astronauts.
All four astronauts wore SpaceX spacewalk suits because the entire Dragon capsule would be depressurized during the two-hour spacewalk, exposing all of them to a hazardous environment.
Isaacman and SpaceX's Sarah Gillis will take turns jumping out of the hatch for short hops, twisting and turning to test out their custom-made spacesuits with black-and-white trim.
In both cases, your hands or feet are constantly touching an attached support structure that resembles the top of a capsule or pool ladder.
You won't be dangling from the end of a 12-foot rope or sporting a jetpack — only NASA suits on the space station are equipped with jetpacks, and only in emergencies.
Pilot Scott Kidd-Poteet and SpaceX's Anna Menon will monitor the spacewalk from inside the craft, which, like all SpaceX astronaut flights, will end with a water landing off the coast of Florida.
“Hugs to you all from the ground,” launch director Frank Messina radioed after the crew reached orbit. “Here's to making history and coming home safe.”
Isaacman responded: “We couldn't have made this journey without the 14,000 of you at SpaceX and everyone else who supports us.”
At a press conference before the flight, Isaacman, CEO and founder of credit card processing company Shift4, declined to say how much he had invested in the flight. “Absolutely not,” he said.
SpaceX partnered with Isaacman to develop the suit and pay related costs, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president who previously ran space mission operations for NASA.
“We're starting to work with the private sector to push the boundaries,” Gerstenmaier said.
This is the first of three flights that Isaacman purchased from Elon Musk two and a half years ago, shortly after returning from the first private SpaceX spaceflight in 2021.
Isaacman accompanied pageant winners and childhood cancer survivors on tours, which he funded for an undisclosed sum that raised hundreds of millions of dollars for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Development of the spacesuits has taken longer than expected, and the first flight of the so-called “Polaris Dawn” has been postponed until now.
The training was extensive and Poteat said it rivaled anything he experienced during his career as an Air Force aviator.
As SpaceX astronaut trainers, Gillis and Menon helped Isaacman and his former team, as well as professional NASA crews, prepare for spaceflight.
“I wasn't even born when man walked on the moon,” Isaacman, 41, said ahead of the launch. “I want my kids to see man walking on the moon, Mars and exploring the solar system.”
There was a two-week delay due to bad weather.
The crew needed favorable weather forecasts not only for the launch, but also for the splashdown a few days later, and with limited supplies and no way to reach the space station, they had no choice but to wait for conditions to improve.
