BETHLEHEM, Pa. – It’s safe to say most people who filled Zoellner Arts Center’s Baker Hall on Tuesday night wouldn’t mind being in Jared Isaacman’s shoes– or astronaut boots, for that matter.
Isaacman is, after all, an extremely successful entrepreneur, pilot and pioneering force in the nascent world of commercial space travel. He’s also a high school dropout, a tidbit that came up more than once in the conversation with Isaacman, who was the inaugural guest for Lehigh University’s new Future Makers Speaker Series.
“To be very clear for everyone in this room, I absolutely believe the well-paved road of higher education will certainly give you the most opportunities in life,” Isaacman said, shortly after he was introduced by Nathan Urban, Lehigh’s provost and senior vice president of academic affairs.
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His parents, Isaacman said, “were insane” to let him leave high school at 16 years old to grow a new payment processing company in the basement of the family’s New Jersey home. That company would become the Lehigh County-based Shift4, which now has 6,000 employees around the world and processes more than $260 billion a year.
Isaacman, now 42 years old, is also a licensed pilot who founded Draken International, described as the world’s largest private air force, which provides contract air services for the U.S. military.
According to Forbes, Isaacman has a net worth of about $1.4 billion.Â
Despite all of his successes, Isaacman has remained humble.
“A lot of things had to go my way,” he said. “A lot of luck, the ball bouncing my way in order to wind up where I’ve been in life. Normally leaving school early should not result in this kind of outcome.”
Lehigh’s Future Makers series aims to bring “innovators and disruptors” to campus, it said, those whose work is “actively shaping the future of critical industries, disciplines and sectors of society.” While Isaacman’s role in shaping his businesses would seem to fit that bill, it’s his passion for pursuits of a more celestial nature that dominated most of the conversation.Â
Isaacman previously led two private missions into space with Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX. During the most recent mission in September, the first of three planned as part of the Polaris Program, Isaacman and the all-civilian crew spent five days in orbit. Isaacman performed the first private spacewalk while soaring more than 400 miles above Earth.
Isaacman doesn’t have time for naysayers who think money spent on advancements in space exploration would be better used fixing the world’s ills.
“You’ve got to do both,” he told the crowd. “You have to make some investments in a brighter future that you want someday, and you also have an obligation to try and deal with some of the hardships around.”
And Isaacman is doing both. Both of his trips to space were also major fundraisers for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. The Lehigh Valley also has benefited from Isaacman’s philanthropy; his family’s contributions supported the Next Generation Science Institute at Allentown’s Da Vinci Science Center, as well as a children’s emergency room at St. Luke’s Fountain Hill campus, and a new education center at the Lehigh Valley Zoo.
But Isaacman did acknowledge that the space industry can’t be funded in perpetuity by taxpayer dollars. What’s needed, he said, is a specific space economy: “We need to figure out why we need to be in space, and how to unlock more value than we put into it.” Perhaps it’s tapping into asteroid-sourced minerals, mining Helium-3 on the moon, or finding that elusive cure for cancer. Whatever it is, “we will crack the code,” Isaacman said.
Earlier this year, Isaacman seemed like a shoo-in to serve as the next NASA administrator; that is, until President Trump announced he was pulling the nomination, following a public feud with Elon Musk. There are rumblings, though, that the job interview may not be over yet. Bloomberg was first to report that Trump and Isaacman met recently to discuss a possible resurrection of the nomination; according to Reuters, Isaacman also met with acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.
Isaacman didn’t address the speculation during the event on Tuesday, although at one point he did jokingly refer to himself as a failed NASA nominee, who “might not know what the hell I’m talking about.”
It seems that regardless of what happens with the top job at NASA, Isaacman remains all-in on outer space. “We have not even dipped our toe in the grandest sea of all,” he said. “We’ve really just begun.”Â