Billionaire-pilot Jared Isaacman, who headed the Earth-orbiting Polaris flight that marked a series of incredible breakthroughs for independent astronauts, says his ultimate goal is to safeguard human civilization by sprinkling it across other planets, starting with Mars.
Across a sweeping interview, Isaacman told me the tech advances he tested during his five-day flight demo – from the next-generation SpaceX spacesuits to the Dragon space capsule specially adapted for spacewalks – are all aimed at helping humanity create outposts across the solar system.
Isaacman, who co-funded the super-speed development of SpaceX’s cutting-edge space body armor, predicted this astro-gear will ultimately protect spacefarers across an atlas of new celestial destinations.
“This is meant to be a stepping stone for the millions of spacesuits for the Moon and Mars travellers of the future,” he told me.
He shares SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s vision of terraforming Mars as a million interplanetary nomads join a collective odyssey to the orange-red Martian dunes.
By recreating Mars in the Earth’s image, with a restored ocean and atmosphere, and domed human-engineered Edens crisscrossing the Martian shorelines, the twin planets could become mutually protective arks of life and civilization, ready to rescue the other if some world-shattering catastrophe were to strike.
During his Polaris Dawn mission, Isaacman was the first independent astronaut ever to open the hatch of a SpaceX spacecraft in orbit – protected only by his experimental spacesuit – while potentially exposed to space shrapnel circling the planet at 28,000 kilometers per hour.He piloted the capsule through the intense radiation of the Van Allen belt in low Earth orbit, before leading a surreal spacewalk, backlit by a glowing blue globe, and then navigating the Dragon’s fiery atmospheric reentry.
“Every one of the mission objectives of the Polaris Dawn flight,” he says, “support making humanity a multi-planetary species.”
On the eve of Isaacman’s launch into orbit, SpaceX’s creator told his 200 million followers on X: “The first Starships to Mars will launch in 2 years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens.”
If these robotically piloted Starships ace their landings on the Martian surface, Elon Musk added, “then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years.”
“Flight rate will grow exponentially from there,” he predicted, “with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.”
The SpaceX visionary sketched out his masterplan to construct the first technopolis on Mars – across two decades and 10,000 flights of the futuristic Starship – during a fantastical overview he narrated – like a sci-fi film – from his Starbase launch center, just off the turquoise seas of the Gulf of Mexico.
“Starship is is really the key to making life multiplanetary,” Musk said, backdropped by three massive prototypes of the silver super-ship.
“The overarching goal of the company is to extend life sustainably to another planet – Mars is the only option really – and to do so ideally before World War III.”
In advance of some doomsday chain of events threatening the people and the future of the Earth, he added, SpaceX’s aim is to “build out as quickly as possible a self-sustaining civilization on Mars.”
“If there’s something that takes out Earth, like let’s say there’s a World War III – global thermonuclear warfare,” he said, Mars could provide a weapons-free sanctuary that protects at least part of humanity, and the long-term survival of the human race.
He also predicted that spiralling marvels of engineering could restore Mars as a water world, with a thickening atmosphere and artificial magnetic field that could protect its denizens from hazardous solar and cosmic radiation.
“We can warm up Mars. We can densify the atmosphere and there would be a liquid ocean on about 40% of the surface,” he projected, like a Space Age oracle.
“So we could make it an Earth-like planet.”
SpaceX’s chief designer is just the latest in a line of vanguard space scholars who propose that christening an archipelago of off-planet colonies is the best strategy to protect the future of Homo sapiens before the home world is threatened by nuclear warfare, mass bioterrorism, or cosmic cataclysms.
During one of his last interviews, the world-acclaimed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC that if the planet’s leading space players began constructing cosmopolitan cities across other planets and moons before one of these globe-shaking catastrophes hits, “A disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”
Space seer Isaacman agrees: “Throughout Earth’s history there has been a series of extinction events that would have wiped out humans if we had been here then.”
In just one example, he says, the 10-kilometer asteroid that crashed into the planet 66 million years ago killed all but the winged dinosaurs, and most other life at the time.
Settling on other planets, Isaacman says, “is an obligation we have for the protection of our civilization.”
Not only a remarkable space aviator, Isaacman is also an extraordinary philanthropist: during his first SpaceX flight, called the Inspiration4 mission, he helped raise $240 million for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital – he and his wife personally donated an astounding $125 million.
His explanation for that mission is simple and humble: “No child should die in the dawn of life.”
At the start of the first Space Age, he adds, “some people questioned why the U.S. was spending so much of its budget on space when there are problems back on Earth.”
“I want to show that we can do both philanthropy and space exploration simultaneously,” he says, taking care of the Earth’s most urgent problems while pushing forward humanity’s expansion into the heavens.
The Polaris Dawn team invested two years into training for the recent mission, Isaacman says, during an intensive schedule that included piloting the SpaceX spacecraft across a simulated series of space odysseys, preparing for the immense gravitation forces of lift-off on human centrifuges, and flying jet fighters to replicate the pressure of keeping a cool head while moving at incredible speeds.
To super-charge SpaceX’s astronaut training regimen, Isaacman invited two of its top-flight engineers, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, to join him on the Polaris mission.
“I knew Sarah and Anna would be exceptional for this mission.”
Gillis oversees SpaceX’s astronaut training operations, including for NASA pilots slated to command Dragon flights to the International Space Station, while Menon, a onetime NASA biomedical flight controller for the ISS, is now a SpaceX Mission Director.
Now, Isaacman says, “Sarah and Anna can bring back a lot of astronaut training knowhow and feedback on space technologies to SpaceX from the Polaris Dawn flight.”
With its high-speed advances in training astronauts, SpaceX is closing the gap with the parallel program operated by NASA, says Kip Hodges, one of the top space scholars in the U.S. and the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
Professor Hodges, a one-time member of NASA’s Space Advisory Council who has helped NASA train American, Canadian, and Japanese astronauts on surface operations, told me that any major differences between NASA and SpaceX astronauts are disappearing.
Yet Martin Barstow, a professor of astrophysics and space science at the University of Leicester in the U.K., says another colossal challenge hovers on the horizon.
Although Elon Musk envisions sending one million spacefarers to Mars over the course of 20 years, he says, “There will not be sufficient time or capacity for them to go through a deep training program.”
SpaceX just doesn’t have the capacity to intensely train tens of thousands of spacefarers every year, Professor Barstow told me in an interview.
“Deep training will not be possible on this scale and I don’t think the training could be very advanced,” he says. “It will have to be more about the basics with people then bringing their own pre-existing skills to the party.”
Yet Professor Hodges says his Digital Discovery Initiative team at ASU, which specialises in transforming high-resolution photographs and LIDAR scans of candidate Moon and Mars landing sites into photorealistic virtual reality simulations, could provide a partial solution to training the waves of SpaceX spacefarers slated to fly to the New World on Mars.
If the first fleet of SpaceX Starships set to touch down on Mars in the summer of 2027 deploys a brigade of robots outfitted with sophisticated cameras, sensors and lasers, he says, his team could quickly re-sculpt this imagery and laser-derived point clouds into a never-ending series of VR simulations that the Mars-bound travellers – anywhere across the globe – could explore in depth before lifting off.
“As the time for crewed [Mars] missions draws nearer,” he adds, “these same virtual replicas could be used to plan surface activities during those missions and train the crew accordingly.”
The next-generation technology, colossal size, high-speed evolution and full reusability of the Starship, he says, all represent a planet-changing revolution in spaceflight – one that will be chronicled in history books for centuries into the future.
The high-precision return of the Starship’s Super Heavy booster during its incredible Test Flight 5 – to hover in mid-air at the Starbase launch tower as it was captured by a pair of titanic arms, was astounding, he says.
“That was a pretty amazing accomplishment.”
SpaceX’s hyper-speed progress on the Starship, he adds, is an excellent portent for the upcoming robotic and human landings on Mars.
Space aeronaut Jared Isaacman says he has already commissioned the first Starship flight – when the super-capsule is cleared to carry humans – but adds he hasn’t yet finalised the contours of that mission.
Before taking command of a Starship for the first time, Isaacman told me, he plans to lead one more SpaceX Dragon flight.
Back in 2022, Isaacman proposed to NASA’s leadership that he finance and head a mission to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope, which is in danger of falling back to Earth, by boosting the observatory into a higher orbit.
Thomas Zurbuchen, who then headed NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, initially welcomed the proposal, calling it “an exciting example of the innovative approaches NASA is exploring through private-public partnerships.”
Yet since then, Zurbuchen has left NASA, and the American space agency still hasn’t formally accepted Isaacman’s philanthropic offer to give the great space telescope an extended lifetime.
“There is already a docking mechanism on the Hubble Telescope,” Isaacman says. “It would be easy for the Dragon capsule to dock with Hubble and boost it into a higher orbit.”
Professor Hodges, who has closely collaborated with NASA for more than a decade, says if Jared Isaacman were to offer to bring along a NASA astronaut who has previous experience servicing the Hubble Space Telescope – like Ken Bowersox – on the new reboosting flight, that could persuade NASA to quickly approve the mission.
Meanwhile, Isaacman says it’s difficult to predict how the unfolding Space Race II might alter the trajectory of human progress across the globe, and then beyond.
“I’m hopeful the impact will be a more unified civilization,” he says.
“Earth is an incredible marble in the backdrop of our solar system and the galaxy,” he says, all awaiting human exploration.
Even as humanity moves out across the stars, he adds, “We should see the Earth for the perfect world it is.”
