CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A U.S. billionaire who made a fortune in tech and fighter jets is buying an entire SpaceX flight and plans to take three people with him to circle the globe this year.
Besides fulfilling his dream of flying in space, Jared Isaacman announced Monday that he aims to use the private trip to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, half coming from his own pockets.
A health care worker for St. Jude already has been selected for the mission. Anyone donating to St. Jude in February will be entered into a random drawing for seat No. 3. The fourth seat will go to a business owner who uses Shift4 Payments, Isaacman’s credit card processing company in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“I truly want us to live in a world 50 or 100 years from now where people are jumping in their rockets like the Jetsons and there are families bouncing around on the moon with their kid in a spacesuit,” Isaacman, who turns 38 next week, told The Associated Press.
“I also think if we are going to live in that world, we better conquer childhood cancer along the way.”
He’s bought a Super Bowl ad to publicize the mission, dubbed Inspiration4 and targeted for October. Details of the ride in a SpaceX Dragon capsule are still being worked out, including the number of days the four will be in orbit after blasting off from Florida. The other passengers will be announced next month.
Isaacman’s trip is the latest private space travel announcement. Three businessmen are paying $55 million apiece to fly to the International Space Station next January aboard a SpaceX Dragon. And a Japanese businessman has a deal with SpaceX to fly to the moon in a few years.
Isaacman would not divulge how much he’s paying SpaceX, except to say that the anticipated donation to St. Jude “vastly exceeds the cost of the mission.”
While a former NASA astronaut will accompany the three businessmen, Isaacman will serve as his own spacecraft commander. The appeal, he said, is learning all about about SpaceX’s Dragon and Falcon 9 rocket. While the capsules are designed to fly autonomously, a pilot can override the system in an emergency.
A “space geek” since kindergarten, Isaacman dropped out of high school when he was 16, got a GED certificate and started a business in his parents’ basement that became the genesis for Shift4. He set a speed record flying around the world in 2009 while raising money for the Make-A-Wish program, and later established Draken International, the world’s largest private fleet of fighter jets.
Isaacman’s $100 million commitment to St. Jude in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest ever by a single individual and one of the largest overall.
“We’re pinching ourselves every single day,” said Rick Shadyac, president of St. Jude’s fundraising organization.
Besides SpaceX training, Isaacman intends to take his crew on a mountain expedition to mimic his most uncomfortable experience so far — tenting on the side of a mountain in bitter winter conditions.
“We’re all going to get to know each other … really well before launch,” he said.
He’s acutely aware of the need for things to go well.
“If something does go wrong, it will set back every other person’s ambition to go and become a commercial astronaut,” he said from his home in Easton, Pennsylvania.
Isaacman said he signed with Elon Musk’s company because it’s the clear leader in commercial spaceflight, with two astronaut flights already completed. Boeing has yet to fly astronauts to the space station for NASA. While Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin expect to start flying customers later this year, their craft will just briefly skim the surface of space.
Isaacman had put out spaceflight feelers for years. He travelled to Kazakhstan in 2008 to see a Russian Soyuz blast off with a tourist on board, then a few years later attended one of NASA’s last space shuttle launches. SpaceX invited him to the company’s second astronaut launch for NASA in November.
While Isaacman and wife, Monica, managed to keep his space trip hush-hush over the months, their daughters couldn’t. The girls, ages 7 and 4, overheard their parents discussing the flight last year and told their teachers, who called to ask if it was true dad was an astronaut.
“My wife said, ‘No, of course not, you know how these kids make things up.’ But I mean the reality is my kids weren’t that far off with that one.”
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The body of Ugandan Olympic athlete Rebecca Cheptegei — who died after being set on fire by her partner in Kenya — was received Friday by family and anti-femicide crusaders, ahead of her burial a day later.
Cheptegei’s family met with dozens of activists Friday who had marched to the Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital’s morgue in the western city of Eldoret while chanting anti-femicide slogans.
She is the fourth female athlete to have been killed by her partner in Kenya in yet another case of gender-based violence in recent years.
Viola Cheptoo, the founder of Tirop Angels – an organization that was formed in honor of athlete Agnes Tirop, who was stabbed to death in 2021, said stakeholders need to ensure this is the last death of an athlete due to gender-based violence.
“We are here to say that enough is enough, we are tired of burying our sisters due to GBV,” she said.
It was a somber mood at the morgue as athletes and family members viewed Cheptegei’s body which sustained 80% of burns after she was doused with gasoline by her partner Dickson Ndiema. Ndiema sustained 30% burns on his body and later succumbed.
Ndiema and Cheptegei were said to have quarreled over a piece of land that the athlete bought in Kenya, according to a report filed by the local chief.
Cheptegei competed in the women’s marathon at the Paris Olympics less than a month before the attack. She finished in 44th place.
Cheptegei’s father, Joseph, said that the body will make a brief stop at their home in the Endebess area before proceeding to Bukwo in eastern Uganda for a night vigil and burial on Saturday.
“We are in the final part of giving my daughter the last respect,” a visibly distraught Joseph said.
He told reporters last week that Ndiema was stalking and threatening Cheptegei and the family had informed police.
Four in 10 women or an estimated 41% of dating or married Kenyan women have experienced physical or sexual violence perpetrated by their current or most recent partner, according to the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2022.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
VICTORIA – The British Columbia government is partnering with a bear welfare group to reduce the number of bears being euthanized in the province.
Nicholas Scapillati, executive director of Grizzly Bear Foundation, said Monday that it comes after months-long discussions with the province on how to protect bears, with the goal to give the animals a “better and second chance at life in the wild.”
Scapillati said what’s exciting about the project is that the government is open to working with outside experts and the public.
“So, they’ll be working through Indigenous knowledge and scientific understanding, bringing in the latest techniques and training expertise from leading experts,” he said in an interview.
B.C. government data show conservation officers destroyed 603 black bears and 23 grizzly bears in 2023, while 154 black bears were killed by officers in the first six months of this year.
Scapillati said the group will publish a report with recommendations by next spring, while an independent oversight committee will be set up to review all bear encounters with conservation officers to provide advice to the government.
Environment Minister George Heyman said in a statement that they are looking for new ways to ensure conservation officers “have the trust of the communities they serve,” and the panel will make recommendations to enhance officer training and improve policies.
Lesley Fox, with the wildlife protection group The Fur-Bearers, said they’ve been calling for such a committee for decades.
“This move demonstrates the government is listening,” said Fox. “I suspect, because of the impending election, their listening skills are potentially a little sharper than they normally are.”
Fox said the partnership came from “a place of long frustration” as provincial conservation officers kill more than 500 black bears every year on average, and the public is “no longer tolerating this kind of approach.”
“I think that the conservation officer service and the B.C. government are aware they need to change, and certainly the public has been asking for it,” said Fox.
Fox said there’s a lot of optimism about the new partnership, but, as with any government, there will likely be a lot of red tape to get through.
“I think speed is going to be important, whether or not the committee has the ability to make change and make change relatively quickly without having to study an issue to death, ” said Fox.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 9, 2024.
