Billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman has a big vision for the future of humanity.
He set off on his first mission to space in 2021 – a private journey he paid an estimated $200m (£160m) for – and announced that he wanted space travel to be for the masses, not only for the 600 who have experienced it to date – most of them professional astronauts employed by Nasa and the wealthy.
“We want it to be 600,000,” he told reporters.
Later, he added: “I drank the Kool-Aid in terms of the grand ambitions for humankind being a multi-planet species… I think that we all want to live in a Star Wars, Star Trek world where people are jumping in their spacecraft.”
Mr Isaacman, who made much of his $1.9bn (£1.46bn) fortune from a payment processing company that he founded in 1999 aged 16, is said to have bankrolled the rest of the crew of four aboard the SpaceX craft in the 2021 mission, fuelled by a longstanding love of flying and fascination with space.
