By Kenneth Chang
Three years ago, a billionaire entrepreneur named Jared Isaacman made a groundbreaking trip to space. That space flight, which Isaacman called Inspiration4, was the first to orbit Earth without a professional astronaut aboard.
This week, Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company, is scheduled to head into space again. This time the itinerary is longer, more daring and riskier, and includes a spacewalk, the first by private astronauts.
A test of the spacesuit inside the Dragon capsule. Jared Isaacman, founder and chief of the company Shift4, is leading three other privately trained astronauts on a SpaceX vehicle for Polaris Dawn, a mission that will include a daring spacewalk. Credit: SpaceX via The New York Times
The mission, named Polaris Dawn, hearkens back to the earliest era of spaceflight, the 1960s, …