Back on planet Earth a week after returning from space, Jared Isaacman is still catching up on sleep. “I think I just set a new record of sleep deprivation on this five-day mission,” he chuckles in a phone call from his home in Pennsylvania.
The fighter-jet-flying, space-traveling billionaire took part in a historic orbital mission called Polaris Dawn in mid-September, reaching a distance of 870 miles away from Earth—the highest Earth orbit any human has been to since NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972. On September 12, he also became the first ever private citizen to conduct a spacewalk—alongside crewmember Sarah Gillis, an engineer at Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which operated the mission and designed and built the brand new spacesuits that Isaacman and his three crew members wore.
“I did not expect it to feel the way it did. In my mind I had visualized every step and in the simulators we had done that choreography a hundred times,” says Isaacman of his experience during the spacewalk, technically known as an extravehicular activity, or EVA. “I wasn’t expecting all of the other senses to come together. It gets really cold, the adrenaline starts flying and then there’s some physical exertion because that spacesuit, when it’s pressurized, is very rigid. You have all of that coming together plus the visual stimulus of seeing Earth like that, and it is quite overwhelming.”
The spacewalk was scheduled to last for about two hours, but the whole process took only around 90 minutes. Isaacman and his crewmates spent two and a half years training for the mission, with three-quarters of that taking up about half of each month, while the remainder was nearly full-time preparation work. While only Isaacman and Gillis exited the vehicle—a SpaceX Dragon 2 spacecraft—all four crew members, including SpaceX engineer Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot and longtime friend of Isaacman’s, donned their spacesuits as the spacecraft’s cabin was depressurized.
“When I looked away from Earth, it was a different sensation than I expected. It’s not a welcoming, peaceful feeling,” says Isaacman. “We didn’t evolve to be able to survive in absolutely harsh conditions. But there’s a lot out there for us and it just means we’re going to have to work really hard and be well-prepared if we want to go out and explore.”
Polaris Dawn was Isaacman’s second trip to space. His first, in September 2021, was his Inspiration4 initiative, the first all-civilian mission to space. On that journey, he was accompanied by Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and two first-time civilian astronauts selected through a raffle organized by St. Jude and a competition designed by Isaacman’s payments firm Shift4. The mission helped raise more than $250 million for the hospital, with $125 million reportedly coming from Isaacman and $55 million from Musk.
One of Isaacman’s most poignant moments in space on the Polaris Dawn mission was when his crewmate Sarah Gillis, a classically trained violinist, played the violin on the spacecraft—a moment that was streamed using Musk’s Starlink, with her performance of “Rey’s Theme” from Star Wars accompanied by orchestras from around the world in real-time. “That was an emotional moment,” he says.
The most terrifying? Probably re-entry, says Isaacman. “It’s very different than the way up. It’s a much higher blood pressure environment because you are very helpless. You have no control, you have to come home,” he says, laughing. “You’re in this high risk meteoroid debris environment. You don’t know whether or not you took what could be a catastrophic hit, so in a second it could be all over. You feel the g-forces way more because your body’s been deconditioned, so everything feels more intense—like an elephant sitting on your chest. And then splashdown is a very minor fender bender.”
Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned missions, with a second aboard a SpaceX Dragon 2 expected in roughly two to three years’ time and a third one a similar amount of time after that. The timing of the third voyage also depends on the progress of SpaceX’s massive new spacecraft and rocket system, Starship, which is scheduled to transport the astronauts on the third Polaris mission. Musk congratulated Isaacman on the Polaris Dawn mission on his social media platform X, reposting a video of Isaacman’s words during his spacewalk: “Back at home we have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”
Isaacman’s Shift4 payments company is also an investor in SpaceX; it put $27.5 million into the rocket company in December 2021, when it was valued at around $100 billion. SpaceX is now valued at $208 billion after the latest funding round in June. The value of Shift4’s less than 1% stake in SpaceX has grown by some 140% to an estimated $66 million at the end of June, according to a analysis of the company’s filings.
Isaacman and SpaceX appear to have split the cost of the Polaris Dawn mission, but did not disclose how much they spent. Some reports put the price tag as running into hundreds of millions of dollars. In an emailed statement to , Isaacman said that such figures aren’t accurate, but he wouldn’t elaborate on the total cost. Despite his spending on space, Isaacman is still very wealthy, with an estimated $1.5 billion fortune largely made up of his 25% stake in publicly-traded Shift4.
“Personally, there is no economic benefit for any of these endeavors,” Isaacman says. “I just was very lucky in life and accumulated resources that I can prioritize to subjects I’m very passionate about. St. Jude is obviously one and opening up this last frontier is the other.”
Unlike his first voyage to space, which was to demonstrate that civilian astronauts could safely travel into orbit, Polaris Dawn had more specific scientific goals. “We had three main objectives. We were going very, very high up into a very hostile environment with radiation and micrometeoroid debris,” says Isaacman. “We tested new spacesuits and [spacewalk] operations, new communication methods and about 40 scientific research experiments that will help inform future long-duration missions.”
Isaacman and the rest of the crew spent several days after their return with scientists tracking their vitals, including ultrasounds of all their vital organs, which will help astronauts prepare for future missions. Data from the spacesuits will also help design the next generation of suits developed by SpaceX.
Now that he’s back on Earth, Isaacman is looking forward to his future space pursuits—and is also concerned about the volatile environment back on his home planet, particularly in an election year in the U.S. “It feels like the last ten years have been more divisive than any other time, at least in my lifespan. Every day there’s near violent debate over all of the political issues, the suffering that exists in this world,” he says. “If we can just pull our head out of it from time to time and just see our similarities and what we can accomplish together, we can make a much better, brighter, exciting future for tomorrow. There can be balance.”