The billionaire leader of NASA, who has gone to space twice, has a message for critics of billionaire space travel: You\u2019re \u201coutright wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the crew of Artemis II embarked on the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman<\/a>, the billionaire payments processing company mogul confirmed to lead the agency late last year, praised his fellow billionaires for pouring their own resources into the space race.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m grateful for folks like Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and Sir Richard Branson that have put their resources on the line for a capability for the good of all humankind right now,\u201d he told Politico<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n While interviewer Dasha Burns pointed out that high-profile figures such as UN Secretary-General Ant\u00f3nio Guterres had previously criticized billionaire space flight, Isaacman shot back at other critics: \u201cI think they\u2019re just outright wrong, and ill-informed and going for headlines. It\u2019s such a bad take,\u201d he said. Guterres in 2021 said billionaires were fueling societal mistrust by \u201cjoyriding to space while millions go hungry on Earth<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In defending billionaire space travel, Isaacman, whose net worth is $1.5 billion, according to Forbes<\/a>, said society shouldn\u2019t \u201cpause\u201d the space race just because there are problems here on Earth. He said he could imagine a critic of cell phone towers in the \u201980s saying the same thing about this technology, which ultimately connected the world and improved it. For example, he said, connecting the world with cell phones has helped shine a light on bad actors who commit genocide and in turn has saved millions of lives.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we concentrate all of our resources on the problems and hardships of the day, there is no progress. You don\u2019t hit pause on progress,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Isaacman\u2019s comments come as the Artemis II crew on Monday successfully traveled farther than any astronauts before them<\/a> when their Orion spaceship slingshotted around the Moon propelled by the celestial body\u2019s gravitational force. The astronauts are scheduled to return to Earth late Friday when their ship lands in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego.\u00a0<\/p>\n Isaacman\u2019s space flights<\/p>\n While he hasn\u2019t been to the Moon, Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments and Draken International, which supplies tactical fighter aircraft to the U.S. military and its allies, has been to space twice.<\/p>\n In 2021 Isaacman helped bankroll and then lead Inspiration4, the first all-civilian mission to reach orbit in SpaceX\u2019s Dragon spaceship, flying higher than the suborbital space flights of Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin and Branson\u2019s Virgin Galactic that same year. In 2024 Isaacman became the first civilian to conduct a space walk during SpaceX\u2019s five-day Polaris mission, which he also reportedly helped fund, venturing outside the ship approximately 400 miles above Earth for around 10 minutes to test SpaceX\u2019s EVA space suit.<\/p>\n The commercial space race has heated up in recent years as Blue Origin, SpaceX<\/a>, and Virgin Galactic all seek to seek to dominate an emerging global space industry McKinsey<\/a> predicts could grow to $1.8 trillion by 2035<\/a>. Meanwhile these companies\u2019 billionaire founders, including Bezos and Branson, have already signed up to witness space themselves.\u00a0<\/p>\n