The mission Polaris Dawnstill in progress, already has several historic milestones behind it. It is the spacecraft that has been orbiting the furthest from Earth, 1,400.7 kilometersand the first all-civilian mission to cross the radiation belts Van Allen and has carried out a space walk. They looked outside the Dragon capsule, but they did not manage to get out completely, first Jared Isaacman and then Sara Gilliswhile the other two crew members, Scott Poteet and Anna Menonremained inside.
The driving force behind Polaris Dawn and the fact that all of them have arrived there is the first of them, Isaacman. 41-year-old American billionaire which is known for both its businesses and its adventurous side. In fact, this is not the first time it has traveled to space and it will do so at least in two others, the future Polaris Dawn missions that he financesOf these, the only thing known is that in the third one she will go into space aboard the giant SpaceX rocket, Starship.
SpaceX and the Polaris Dawn crew have completed the first commercial spacewalk!
“SpaceX, back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.” —Mission Commander @rookisaacman during Dragon egress and seeing our planet from ~738 km pic.twitter.com/lRczSv5i4k
— Polaris (@PolarisProgram) September 12, 2024
He has a fortune estimated at about 1.8 billion euros which started with his first company, Founded in 1999 when I was 16 years old. This is the payment processing company Shift4 PaymentsUnited Bank Card in its beginnings, which currently manages One-third of payments in US restaurants and hotels.
But Shift4 Payments is not the only source of his fortune. 2011 founded Draken Internationala defense company that trains U.S. Air Force pilots and owns The world’s largest fleet of private military aircraftIn 2019, Isaacman sold his stake in Draken International to Wall Street firm Blackstone.
Isaacman is a Passionate about aviation since he was young. He learned to fly in 2004, has accumulated more than 7,000 flight hours and has the record for a round-the-world flight in a light aircraft, which he achieved in 2009 in 61 hours and 51 minutes. He did it flying a Cessna Citation CJ2 and skipping stops in India and Japan. The reason was that in his previous attempt, in 2008, he missed the established record of 82 hours by just one hour, due to delays at those stops. This time he surpassed it by far.
The millionaire is also a fan to fly a Mig-29one of the few privately owned in the United States. This is a fourth-generation fighter aircraft designed in the Soviet Union in the 70s and, according to Forbes in 2020, he pilots it ‘faster than the speed of sound and climbs mountains’ to relax after uninterrupted and intense weeks of more than 80 hours‘. The outlet described Isaacman as a ‘‘thrill seeker’something that his biography clearly shows.
The biggest one, before the milestones that it is starring in with Polaris Dawn, was probably flying into space for the first time on the mission Inspiration4also financed by him. In 2021, he left aboard a capsule Crew Dragon of SpaceX in the first space mission composed only of civilians. After three days orbiting the Earth with an apogee of 585 kilometerslanded in the Atlantic Ocean. The cost Isaacman paid for Inspiration4 was, according to Time, 200 million dollars.
Isaacman currently resides in Washington Townshipa small town of just over 6,000 inhabitants in the state of New Jersey. He is married and has two daughters..