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Home , Anousheh Ansari, Billionaire space race, Dennis Tito, Hayley Arceneaux, Inspiration4, Jared Isaacman

DOUBLE ISSUE AUG. 23 / AUG. 30, 2021

THREE DAYS THAT COULD CHANGE HUMANITY INSIDE THE FIRST ALL-CIVILIAN TRIP INTO BY JEFFREY KLUGER

WATCH TIME’S COUNTDOWN: INSPIRATION4 MISSION TO SPACE STARTING SEPT. 6

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Space NEXTTHE NEXT

JARED ISAACMAN ANDNEXT THE ALL-CIVILIAN CREW OF INSPIRATION4 NEXT

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NEXTAIM TO OPEN UP SPACE TRAVEL FOR THE REST OF US

NEXT NEXT FRONTIER

BY JEFFREY KLUGER

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY FOR TIME The women and men of Inspiration4 will be the fi rst all- civilian crew to fl y in space, spending three days in orbit 10,000 ft., but a projected 360 miles up—higher than the Hubble . This time there won’t be four vehicles, but just one: a SpaceX Crew Dragon . And this time the fl iers won’t be moving at 460 m.p.h., but at 17,500 m.p.h., launched into space atop a 215-ft.-tall SpaceX . The mission, dubbed Inspiration4, will mark the fi rst time an all-civilian, non governmental crew has taken to orbit. To make the mission possible, Isaac- man bought all four seats aboard the Dragon for an undisclosed sum (likely in the vicinity of $50 million each). And if he has his way, it will begin to democ- ratize space in a way never before possible. J “I could have just invited a bunch of my pilot bud- dies to go, and we would have had a great time and IS NOT LIKELY TO FORGET THE come back and had a bunch of cocktails,” Isaacman day he almost died at 10,000 ft., back in 2011. He says. “Instead, we wanted to bring in everyday peo- was fl ying closely alongside three others, all in ple and energize everyone else around the idea of L-39 fi ghter jets, tearing along at 460 m.p.h. over opening up spacefl ight to more and more of us.” the desert southwest of Las Vegas. Isaacman’s mission will be the of what The group, part of Isaacman’s Black Diamonds has been America’s summer of civilian spacefl ight. aerobatic team, was rehearsing for an air show and On July 11, founder Richard Bran- trying to come up with a fl ashy new fi nish. What they son fl ew aboard his V.S.S. Unity space plane more decided on called for fl ying in a square formation than 50 miles high over New Mexico, crossing the and then suddenly veering toward one another, be- boundary that the U.S. military considers the thresh- fore pulling back at the last second. It would be a old of space. On July 20, founder Jeff nifty thing to watch go right—and a terrible thing Bezos bested Branson, fl ying aboard hisNew Shepard to watch go wrong. spacecraft above the 62-mile-high mark over — The pilots began the maneuver at their four crossing the so-called von Karman line, the altitude separate corners and then banked in toward one that most experts consider space’s true boundary. another. But their coordination was a mess, and the fully fueled fi ghter jets came screaming toward THERE HAS BEEN much media sizzle around the one another. Branson and Bezos missions, not least because of “Holy sh-t,” exclaimed Isaacman over the radio. the “Billionaire ” headlines. But in fact, He yanked hard on his stick and veered sharply away; the pair did not do a whole lot. Their fl ights were the others did the same. Shortly afterward, the Black little more than 10-min. up-and-down suborbital lob Diamonds landed, gathered to debrief and reached shots. By contrast, Isaacman and his crew will spend three conclusions. First, they had gotten too close three days in orbit, doing real science on a real mis- during the critical approach point. Second, the cause sion. The SpaceX Dragon is largely automated, but was most likely insuffi cient lateral spacing at the be- as Isaacman puts it, “it’s a multiday orbital mission, ginning. Third, they would never try such a high- and there’s just a lot of time for things to go wrong.” stakes stunt again. Then they relaxed—and laughed. So the Inspiration4 crew has been in intensive train- “When you survive it, you can joke about it later,” ing in case anything indeed goes wrong. Isaacman says. “After we debriefed, we were imagin- The business of selecting that crew was as uncon- ing if you were just a hiker in the desert looking up ventional as the mission itself. The world learned and you’re like, ‘Oh, look at that.’ And then you see about Inspiration4 from a 30-sec. commercial Isaac- this collision. It would be most unusual.” man paid to run during the 2021 Super Bowl. The Most unusual is a decidedly understated way spot announced not only the fl ight but also Isaac- to describe one’s own near-death experience, but man’s search for three other people to join him. One Isaacman— now 38 and the billionaire CEO of Shift4 of Inspiration4’s goals is to help raise funds for the Payments, an online- payment company, as well as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, the founder of Draken International, a company that and for that reason one of the four seats would go runs what’s eff ectively the world’s largest private air to a St. Jude employee. (Isaacman aimed to raise force—has always prided himself on a certain sang- $200 million for the hospital; he donated $100 mil- froid. He needed it that day in 2011, and he’ll need lion and has so far raised an additional $13.1 million.) it again this Sept. 15, when he’s set to once again be Another seat would be awarded through a simple part of a team of four trying something very daring. lottery, which contestants could enter by making a This time, Isaacman’s crew won’t be fl ying at contribution of any size to St. Jude. The fi nal seat

28 TIME August 23/August 30, 2021 JARED ISAACMAN, 38 The commander of Inspiration4, Isaacman is the founder and CEO of , an online-payment company. He is also the founder of Draken International, the world’s largest private air force.

would be a little harder to win, with contenders de- has not even had a chance to fl y yet,” says Proctor. signing an online store using Shift4 software and Yet questions surround not only this mission but then developing a social media campaign to share also the entire enterprise of civilian spacefl ight. For their entrepreneurial and space aspirations. one thing, space travel is expensive—and to many The St. Jude worker is , 29, a people, the money could be better spent on solving physician assistant and a survivor of childhood can- the manifold problems on . In an auction for cer; she will be the fi rst person to fl y to space with a seat aboard Bezos’ fl ight, the winner—who later a prosthesis—an artifi cial left femur that replaces decided not to fl y—bid $28 million. That could buy the bone she lost to her disease when she was 10. a lot of schoolbooks or feed a lot of hungry people. The lottery winner is Chris Sembroski, 41, an en- There’s also the question of safety. Space can be gineer at in Everett, Wash., and a a murderous place, a lesson each generation seems U.S. Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and who to have to learn anew. In 1967, NASA’s 1 in a later domestic posting helped oversee a fl eet crew died in a launchpad fi re that almost scuttled of Minuteman nuclear missiles. The winner of the the country’s lunar program. In 1986 came the space online-store competition is , 51, a geo- shuttle Challenger disaster. Then, in 2003, the shut- sciences professor at South Mountain Community tle Columbia broke apart during re-entry. More than College in Phoenix and a two-time NASA a few people worry that giddy ambition, human candidate who in 2009 made it to the fi nal 47 out of hubris and the limits of technology might conspire more than 3,500 candidates before being cut. Now, once again, just as we’re telling ourselves that the not only is she going to space, she’s going sooner cosmic skies are safe for everyone. than she might have on the traditional route. “At “When there is a fatal accident,” says Terry Virts, least one of the people chosen in that class in 2009 a retired NASA astronaut and former International 29 MILES ABOVE SEA Ozone von Karman LEVEL layer line 0 25 50 100 150

Commercial V.S.S. Unity airliners mission mission 6–7 miles 53 miles 67 miles

EARTH NOT TO SCALE

GRAND THE FLIGHT PROFILE Dragon SpaceX takes a traditional route to FINALE orbit, but adds a As the third civilian precision 6 mission of the summer, Second for its reusable Inspiration4 is an ambitious stage first stage About 10 minutes three-day orbital flight, as in, the Dragon capsule opposed to a 10-min. separates from suborbital lob shot. the second stage

THE NEW FLEET SPACEX How the three big Crew Dragon/ space companies’ Falcon 9 3 crew vehicles 215 FT. 2 Gas stack up MAX. 7 CREW MEMBERS About 50 thrusters Crew Launching miles up, engage to compartments Sept. 15 First flip it stage the reusable first stage 4 VIRGIN GALACTIC BLUE ORIGIN separates V.S.S. Unity New Shepard Grid fins 60 FT. 60 FT. deploy to 6 PASSENGERS 6 PASSENGERS guide the stage, 2 PILOTS Launched and engines Launched July 20 burn to slow it July 11 1 Rocket lifts off 5 with more than Legs extend 1.7 million lb. and engines of thrust burn a final Astronaut time for landing

Space Station (ISS) commander, “and I wouldn’t say as he reached his teens, at the privileges age af- if, I would say when, that’s going to be a real concern.” forded his siblings and the ones it denied him. Isaacman sees things diff erently. “There’s always “They were out living their lives and I still had to a risk that something goes wrong, like a structural raise my hand to use the restroom in school, and I failure,” he says. “But you have confi dence in the was like, ‘This is ridiculous,’” he says. whole system and the measures that have gone into Isaacman dropped out of high school in 1999 , place to minimize the risk. Sometimes you land when getting his GED to satisfy his parents. At the time, your knees are clanking together and you say you’re he and a high school classmate were trying to start lucky to be alive. But you are—and you move on.” their own computer and web business, but getting nowhere. So Isaacman went to work at tech retailer IT’S ENTIRELY POSSIBLE there would have been CompUSA, with the idea, he says, “that I could gen- no Shift4 Payments—never mind Inspiration4—if erate business and I could poach some customers.” Jared Isaacman had been a more patient kid. The As it turned out, a customer—a credit-card company child of parents who were both on their second mar- called MSI—poached him to solve its IT problems. riages, he came into the world with two half broth- “I worked there for about six months, and ers and a half sister who are 15, 13 and nine years like a lot of people, I totally disliked one of my older. That chafed—not so much the business of bosses,” he says. “I saw an to do being so junior a member of the sibling brood, but, things better and more effi ciently, so I left there

30 TIME August 23/August 30, 2021 200 300 350

ISS Hubble Inspiration4 orbit orbit mission (proj.) 250 miles 340 miles 360 miles

Engines Entirely automatic ... Windows or not Pressurized The Dragon will crew section 7 largely fly itself, but the crew must be For the next three ready to take over in days the crew an emergency the earth and Heat performs medical shield experiments 16 thrusters help Side orient hatch the craft

Four fins on the base of the trunk help stabilize the Dragon in the event of 8 Nose cone an emergency abort opens to Capsule a windowed re-enters atmosphere and main Launch abort system chutes deploy separates capsule from at 6,500 ft. rocket in case of emergency

Unpressurized trunk section Modernized instrument panels Half of it is covered in solar panels Three large touchscreens to provide power. The trunk face the four . detaches shortly before re-entry. It Each screen is capable of 9 also is used to hold cargo and has calling up 10 sets of a capacity of 1,300 cu. ft. displays off the coast of

SOURCES: SPACEX; NASA; NEWS REPORTS. TIME GRAPHIC BY JEFFREY KLUGER AND LON TWEETEN and started the company that I still run today.” is being processed by Shift4 equipment and soft- Isaacman named his new enterprise United Bank ware. In hotels, it’s about a 40% chance. Card and slowly began generating a customer base But Isaacman, as Shift4 chief of staff Terry Sul- from people he had met at MSI. The new company— livan puts it, “doesn’t do things that sort of normal which he set up in his parents’ basement—marketed people do. He’s so full of ambition and just takes on hardware and software allowing restaurants, bars these mountains of projects.” and other businesses to process credit- and debit- One of those projects was the unusual business of card transactions, a hot business amid the digitize- assembling his own private air force, with over 100 everything mania of the late 1990s. combat jets acquired from half a dozen countries. Over the past 22 years, Isaacman’s company has The force—known as Draken after the Greek word expanded and gobbled smaller fi rms—including for dragon, was formally founded as a private com- one called Shift4, a name it took for itself (on a com- pany in 2011; the U.S. military pays it to fl y simu- puter keyboard, holding shift and hitting 4 gets you lated dogfi ghts with American pilots, training them a dollar sign). The company, now headquartered in against the kind of real weaponry that they could one Allentown, Pa., went public last year. It currently has day face in a genuine shooting war. 1,300 employees and a market capitalization of just Draken was an outgrowth of Isaacman’s love of over $7 billion. Today, if you go into any restaurant or fl ying, nurtured when he was 12 years old and at- bar in the U.S., there’s a 50% chance your transaction tended space camp in Huntsville, Ala., where his 31 Space

HAYLEY ARCENEAUX, 29 CHRIS SEMBROSKI, 41 A survivor of childhood cancer, Arceneaux now A veteran of the Iraq War, Sembroski is works at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital now an engineer with Lockheed Martin in Memphis. She will be the fi rst person to fl y in in Everett, Wash. He will serve as mission space with a prosthesis—an artifi cial femur to specialist on Inspiration4, responsible for replace the bone she lost to her disease. cargo and some experiments.

parents agreed to spend an extra $75 to let him take trench that’s like 300 yd. away—it’s a par 3 away introductory fl ying lessons on a Cessna 172. Plenty of from the rocket. If you’re at , people who start with a Cessna stick with a Cessna, the closest you’re going to get to a rocket going off but Isaacman was hungrier than that. He eventu- is like 31∕2 miles.” ally got certifi ed in 20 civilian and military jets, in- The next year, Isaacman approached SpaceX— cluding the Soviet MiG-29. He also re-enrolled in which at the time was still more than a decade away school, at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in from carrying its fi rst crews to space—about buying a Daytona Beach, Fla., earning an undergraduate de- seat. A draft contract was hammered out, but it took gree in studies in 2012 while also setting SpaceX far longer than expected to get the go-ahead up his Black Diamonds team. to fl y human passengers, leaving the deal to languish Even before founding Draken and the Black Dia- and lapse. But in May of last year, SpaceX fi nally got monds, Isaacman was itching to fl y much higher. In its fi rst two-person crew to the ISS, and Isaacman 2008, he was invited to the — saw another opportunity. which is in , but functions essentially as “I think at some point or other, I might fl y on one ’s Cape Canaveral—to watch the launch of a of your ,” he recalls telling a senior SpaceX of- rocket that was carrying , one fi cial late last year. (Isaacman declines to disclose the of the world’s fi rst paying . names of any SpaceX offi cials with whom he has con- “It was amazing,“ says Isaacman. “I mean, watch- ducted discussions related to his mission.) To Isaac- ing any rocket go up is pretty incredible, but watch- man’s surprise, the offi cial responded directly— and ing a Soyuz go up is something else. You’re in this encouragingly. “That may be coming along faster than

32 TIME August 23/August 30, 2021 you might think,” the offi cial said. Indeed it did: four HISTORY hours later, Isaacman was put in touch over email with the head of SpaceX’s human spacefl ight program. FOUR DECADES “We understand you might be interested at some point in going on a fl ight with us,” the program OF CIVILIAN head told Isaacman on a follow-up call. “Well, you could be the fi rst private passenger—and it could be inside of a year.” The two reached a verbal handshake, and all that By Olivia B. Waxman was left was for Isaacman to break the news to his family. His wife Monica was not surprised. They’ve It’s been 52 years since Jeff Discovery. NASA’s been together for 20 years, and she knew this was Gates booked lunar passage Space Flight Participant Program, something he’d been hankering to do for a long time. via Pan Am’s “First Flights an effort to launch teachers, She agreed straightaway. For the couple’s two daugh- Club,” a marketing stunt from journalists and other storytellers ters, ages 7 and 5, the notion is more fanciful than the now defunct airline. Like and infl uencers, soon followed, real. “To them, space is all Baby Yoda at this point,” thousands of other would-be though it was scrapped after the Isaacman says. astronauts, he made his Challenger disaster. reservation after watching NASA’s The title of “fi rst space FOR THE INSPIRATION4 CREW, the past fi ve months astronauts land on the tourist,” however, is generally have been a fl at-out sprint to their planned Septem- moon. But he didn’t think much agreed to belong to , ber launch. Isaacman, who assigned himself the posi- about his “ticket” until the space a fi nancial entrepreneur who in tion of commander, wants a tight, professional and shuttle Challenger broke apart 2001 paid a reported $20 million prepared crew. He personally designed part of the shortly after liftoff in 1986, killing for a trip to the International training program, which in part called for fl ying each all seven aboard—including (ISS) aboard a crew member in his Soviet MiG-29, exposing them to Christa McAuliffe, who would have Russian Soyuz rocket. Tito’s the kinds of g-forces they’ll experience during liftoff been the fi rst teacher in space. trip came as Moscow’s space and re-entry. Also on the agenda was a two-day hike That’s when Gates, now 72, program was bleeding cash, realized “commercial space leading Russia to throw open up to 10,000 ft. on Mount Rainier in travel isn’t going to be normalized its doors to people with enough State this past April. anytime soon,” as he put it. money to make the journey. Other “We got snowed on a lot of the way,” says Arce- But Gates has been watching space tourists followed Tito, neaux, the St. Jude physician assistant, who made in recent weeks as a series of including telecom entrepreneur the hike despite her prosthetic femur. “And our civilian space missions—Richard , video-game ham-and-cheese sandwiches wound up frozen.” Branson’s Virgin Galactic fl ight, developer Richard Garriott and “The constant plodding upward really did me in,” ’ Blue Origin launch, software billionaire Charles says Sembroski, the engineer. “My legs were on fi re.” and the upcoming Inspiration4 Simonyi (who, notably, is the That, in some ways, was the whole idea. “We want mission—are bringing his only space tourist to have made to get comfortable with being uncomfortable,” Isaac- space dreams ever closer to repeat trips, fl ying in 2007 and man says. “A lot of things in the spacecraft will be reality. Still, this summer’s again in 2009). uncomfortable, after all.” civilian launches are just the Now, with the rise of U.S.- The rest of their training has mostly involved the latest in a long history of private based private space companies usual NASA-style simulator and classroom work, citizens’ blasting into space. like Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin only on a compressed timeline. On a recent day at Civilians have been joining highly and ’s SpaceX, SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., the crew trained astronauts for nearly civilians with a hankering to blast practiced opening and closing the hatch, what to do four decades—a mixture of themselves into space no longer in the event of a pressure leak in the hatch seal, tech- politicians who had power over need to travel to the remote desert steppe of Baikonur, niques for earth observation, and splashdown and NASA’s budget, people selected as publicity stunts or in the name Kazakhstan, for a ride aboard recovery procedures—and that was all before lunch. of diplomacy, and billionaires a Russian rocket. It’s still early “I’m used to doing things on NASA time, which with plenty of cash to burn. days for all three companies, gives you two years to train for a mission,” says Proc- Among the fi rst nontraditional none of which has announced tor. “We have from March to September.” astronauts to fl y was Senator formal plans for another civilian Once in space, the crew will be kept busy. Proc- Jake Garn (R., Utah), a former launch. But for Gates and other tor will be the pilot—eff ectively Isaacman’s second in chair of the subcommittee civilians dreaming of a trip to command and responsible for calling up checklists, charged with overseeing NASA’s the stars, their ship may come monitoring systems and executing commands. Sem- budget; he once joked that the in—and blast off—soon enough. broski is mission specialist, responsible for repairs as agency wouldn’t get “another “Jeff Bezos, , well as proper stowing of cargo to avoid weight and cent” unless they let him go to Elon Musk should make good balance issues. Arceneaux is the chief medical offi cer space. NASA granted his wish in on my ticket to the moon,” says and will oversee most of the scientifi c experiments; 1985, when he fl ew aboard the Gates. Space

she’ll take blood samples, for instance, to study the crews’ microbiomes. For all of the mission’s ambition, there remains the question of whether civilian astronauts ought to be fl ying to space at all. For one thing, the notion that the Bezos, Branson and Inspiration4 fl ights represent a great opening of the space door assumes that every- one can aff ord the quarter-million dollars Branson charges or the $50 million or so that the Inspiration4 seats probably cost. It’s possible that costs will fall as the industry grows. But even if the price tag of a Branson mission were slashed by 80%, that’s still $50,000 for 10 minutes in space. Then there’s that matter of whether that money could be better spent on earth. Of course, any single dollar spent on any enterprise—Silicon Valley tech, auto manufacturing, sports stadiums—could instead be spent on humanitarian causes. Yet space, to many, feels more frivolous, and thus gets hit harder by crit- ics. But some say the case against space spending doesn’t hold up. “These people—Bezos and Branson and Isaac- man—aren’t spending money on themselves,” says John Logsdon, the founder of the Institute at George Washington University. “They’re spending money to create a business; these are business invest- ments that create jobs and bolster the economy. If they’re successful, they’re risking their own money to build those businesses. Well, that’s capitalism, right?”

THERE’S ALSO THE QUESTION of safety. Isaacman often points out that it took only 12 years after SIAN PROCTOR, 51 Charles Lindbergh’s solo trip across the Atlantic be- Proctor has tried to get to space before, having applied fore Pan Am introduced commercial transatlantic to be a NASA astronaut. In 2009, she made it to the service. But physics has a say in this too. Commercial fi nal 47 out of an applicant class of more than 3,500. air service does not require the 4.9-mile-per-second speeds it takes to orbit earth, it does not regularly subject passengers to four g’s, and it does not require passengers to climb atop the controlled bomb that is I’m not nervous about a poor outcome,” says Arce- a Falcon 9 rocket. People have died in space; people neaux. “I’ve met the lead engineers for every aspect have died merely trying to get to space—but always of our mission, and they know what they’re doing. in the service of a larger scientifi c and geopolitical Inspiration4 is in wonderful hands.” mission. If people die in the service of something that Isaacman is equally confi dent. “You just accept seems less noble, the space market as a whole could there’s a very, very low probability of something dry up as fast as the dirigible business did following going wrong,” he says. the Hindenburg disaster. He should know. He’s come back from harrow- That kind of mortal danger attends all space ing fl ying before—and space, he’s convinced, is an fl ights, but Isaacman and his crew seem to have al- order of magnitude safer than air shows. His concern, ready priced it into their thoughts about the mis- he says, is more about performance. If Inspiration4 sion. They say they are confi dent that the hardware won’t in fact kick the door to space travel wide open, they’re fl ying will take them to and from space safely. allowing the rest of us to pour through after, it can at And with good reason: the Falcon 9 rocket has been least crack that door, coming just a little closer to nor- successfully launched more than 120 times, and malizing rocket travel and democratizing space. For while the Crew Dragon is a newer spacecraft, with Isaacman, that carries with it not just a responsibil- only three crewed missions, it has fl own admirably ity to his crew, but to history to get the mission right. so far (Dragon has also fl own more than 20 equally “I am constantly thinking about good execution,” successful uncrewed missions). he says. “We have to fl y well; we have to earn the “I have so much faith in our SpaceX team that right to be here.” 

34 TIME August 23/August 30, 2021