Is billionaire's 'risky' space flight about research or tourism?

Jared Isaacman is about to go where no billionaire has gone before. The entrepreneur is making his second trip into space, this time a "longer, more daring and riskier" journey into high-earth orbit that will include a spacewalk, said The New York Times. The journey aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule will be a "purely commercial effort" featuring a crew of private-sector astronauts; NASA has nothing to do with this trip. But all involved say this is not just a sight-seeing jaunt. "The real focus is on what we stand to gain and learn from it," Isaacman said.

His trip is "the most ambitious — and risky — private spaceflight yet," said Scientific American. The so-called "Polaris Dawn" journey will launch into an "ultrahigh" orbit more than 800 miles high (where no human has flown since the Apollo moon missions) to the Van Allen radiation belt that surrounds the planet, in order to test the radiation's effect on humans. Later on, it will conduct the first-ever private spacewalk. The overriding aim to all this? To lay the groundwork for Elon Musk's planned trip to Mars. "It's time to go out," said SpaceX's Bill Gerstenmaier. "It's time to explore."

'Expanding human activity in space'

"When it comes to expanding human activity in space, Polaris Dawn is the real deal," Eric Berger said at Ars Technica. The flight will "push the ball of exploration forward" thanks to Isaacman, who has spent  "hundreds of millions of dollars to fly into space" in order to "expand the window" of who can become an astronaut. The suits that Isaacman and another crew member will use on their spacewalk are the first generation of cheaper, leaner suits that will make it easier for future explorers to leave their spacecraft. That's useful. "It really is not a space tourism mission," said Berger.

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Isaacman "is not just interested in duplicating what professional astronauts have experienced," Jackie Wattles said at CNN. Instead, he is "personally exposing himself to the risks" of testing new technologies "in the unforgiving void of outer space." All this with a goal of making humans a "multiplanetary species," which is risky work. "What Jared is doing — he's not just going for a joyride," said SpaceX consultant Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut. 

'The inspiration side of it'

"In the era of private spaceflight, who gets to be an astronaut?" Briley Lewis said at Popular Science. Fewer than 700 people have ever gone into space, and most of them have been "rigorously-trained and ridiculously impressive." Private citizens have been buying their way into space only since 2001, starting with investor Dennis Tito in 2001, but it hasn't just been rich people — planetary scientists, cancer survivors and America's first Black astronaut have all hitched rides in recent years. There's more to come. "Private spaceflight is just getting started," added Lewis.

Technical achievements aren't the only goals for Isaacman's trip. He also hopes the mission "inspires," said NBC News. "This is the inspiration side of it," he said. "Anything that's different than what we've seen over the last 20 or 30 years is what gets people excited."