Jake Turx’s great terrestrial journey into the final frontier

As ELON MUSK aims to put a MAN ON MARS and DONALD TRUMP vows to put the government back in the SPACE BUSINESS, we head for STARBASE, the maverick Tesla owner’s mysterious Texas space port, and talk to JASON ISAACMAN – billionaire fighter jet pilot and ASTRONAUT in a bid to fathom whether PRIVATE ENTERPRISE can outmatch state might, and whether those dreams of life on the RED PLANET are just around the corner or an INTERGALACTIC JOKE

Escape Velocity

Jared Isaacman is one billionaire who just can’t stay grounded

IF you think your hobbies are costly, consider those of Jared Isaacman. He collects fighter jets, commands rockets, and occasionally takes a stroll in orbit.

“On my last mission, we went farther away from Earth than anyone’s gone in a half century,” says Isaacman.

That was in 2024, while most Americans were fixated on the presidential campaign. Isaacman, meanwhile, was 870 miles above Earth, piloting the SpaceX Polaris Dawn record-breaking mission.

At 42, he’s gone from processing credit cards in a New Jersey basement to becoming the most audacious civilian explorer of the space age. For a moment, his trajectory seemed destined to climb even higher: President Trump nominated him to lead NASA, only for politics to pull the appointment back to Earth before it could lift off. But his story is less about escaping gravity than about redefining it.

The high-school-dropout-turned-entrepreneur made his money in the money business, building Shift4 Payments into a multibillion-dollar credit processing company. So far, so traditional. But his career literally took off when he parlayed his lifelong fascination with flight into the launch of Draken International, now one of the largest privately owned fleets of fighter jets in the world, providing adversary training for the US Air Force.

Then, in 2021, he made history as the first private astronaut to command an all-civilian orbital mission, Inspiration4, which doubled as a philanthropic magnum opus, raising hundreds of millions for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As with Polaris Dawn, it was a SpaceX mission that Isaacman helped sponsor.

He is Elon Musk’s reluctant co-star, Trump’s almost-NASA chief, and the most adventurous businessman since Vasco da Gama. And in this new era of private space exploration, when billionaires double as astronauts and rocket companies rival governments, Isaacman distinguishes himself not only with his checkbook but with his pilot’s logbook.

Isaacman’s story is more than a billionaire’s adventure tale. It’s a lens on the new space age itself. Where governments once called the shots, private citizens now bankroll missions and pilot the ships, and a Jewish guy from New Jersey has a stake in the debate over what humanity’s future beyond Earth might look like.