SpaceX Inspiration4 commander Jared Isaacman Q&A
The historic Inspiration4 mission, launched and operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, returned safely from orbit last month.
CNBC spoke to the mission’s commander and benefactor Jared Isaacman about the experience. He spent three days in SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule in orbit alongside the Inspiration4 crew of four – which included pilot Sian Proctor, medical officer Hayley Arceneaux and mission specialist Chris Sembroski – having launched on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.
“The single most impactful moment for me was the moonrise,” Isaacman said. “That just made me think that we’ve got to just get our a– in gear a little bit more and get out there.”
The primary goal of the mission was to raise $200 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, donated $100 million in addition to purchasing the spaceflight, and Musk also personally pledged $50 million to St. Jude after the mission. Inspiration4 has raised $238.2 million for St. Jude as of Tuesday, according to the mission’s website.
Read the question and answer interview with Isaacman below. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
The Inspiration4 crew visited SpaceX headquarters after the mission: Any new takeaways from that debrief?
There was the crew giving our experiences – what we saw, or what we heard or what we felt – back to the engineers, so they can learn from that going forward, and then there were separate debriefs where the engineers are debriefing Dragon, Falcon, operations. They learned some things from us based on our experiences, and then we learned some things from them based on what they learned from the vehicle or the booster.
How do you describe the feeling of space adaptation syndrome [a form of motion sickness space travelers experience]?
Space adaptation syndrome is certainly real. Approximately 50% have [had the syndrome] happen throughout spaceflight history, across NASA astronauts and such. There’s not a whole lot up until now that you can do to predict it. You [even have] hardcore fighter pilots that just get sick in space. What they do know is the recovery is very quick – usually even without medication it’s less than 24 hours – and they do know that certain medications will reduce it even further. In terms of just general odds, those odds played out with us. The medications made it a shorter recovery and everybody was happy and healthy shortly thereafter.
What I do think was interesting is that for SpaceX, given their objective to put like potentially millions of people in space someday, we did participate in a research experiment before and after the mission. Based on the data so far, and it’s a small sample size, they would have predicted 100% would have been faced with it. So that’s good because now maybe there’s a different medication that those people who are susceptible to it could take before launch and minimize that impact … it reinforces the real role of a medical officer on a mission…