Flair, hope and generosity all you need to win a trip to space
BUDDING American astronauts are making last-minute pitches Dragons’
Den- style pitches to a billionaire tech mogul in order to win a place on the first ever civilian space mission.
Jared Isaacman, founder and chief executive of payments technology company Shift4 Payments, is offering three seats on a SpaceX Crew Dragon rocket to people who show entrepreneurial flair, generosity and hope. The venture is supporting efforts to raise $200million (£144million) for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, to help fight childhood cancer, with half the sum already donated by Mr Isaacman.
An accomplished pilot, he will be the commander on the mission, making it the first ever all-civilian trip to space.
One seat has already been given to a hospital worker from St Jude and another will be given to someone who donates to the research hospital via an online portal. The third will be decided in a Dragons’ Den- style contest run by Shift4 Payments – users must design their own website on the platform.
Once the winners have been finalised at midnight today, they will be fitted for uniforms and undergo training, with a plan to launch sometime within the last three months of the year.
Mr Isaacman started his company in 1999, when he was 16, and has built it into a New York stock exchange-registered firm with more than 1,200 employees. Mr Isaacman has already committed $100million to St Jude and took out a $5.5million 30-second advert during the Superbowl last month. Then he had to pay for the four seats. While he has not disclosed how much it cost him, Nasa pays $55 million for each astronaut who makes a SpaceX trip.
Flying with Mr Isaacman is 29-yearold Hayley Arceneaux, the first bone cancer survivor to be an astronaut, the first person with a prosthetic body part to visit space and the youngest American to orbit Earth. As a child, she was treated St Jude for osteosarcoma.