Polaris Dawn - Your Very Own Human Space Program

in 2021 we saw the inspiration for crew spend nearly 3 days in space in a crew Dragon capsule on the surface it looked like a billionaire taking three people with him to have some fun in orbit as part of a fundraising event a very successful fundraising event raising $243 million for St Jude Children's Research Hospital but there were a few strange things about it the first was the amount of training they did they flew in high performance Jets owned by a company that isaacman formed in 2012 and sold in 2019 dren International dren has had training contracts for the US Air Force US Marine Corps and the US Navy they did zerog g training in an airplane that flies parabolic paths one of the so-called vomit comets they went on arduous TRS in th and they did long hours of simulator training for their flight there's a name for this sort of training it's called Astronaut training and isaacman goal was to create a crew of Civilian astronauts for this Mission but why that was a lot of extra work and expense for everybody who was involved and it wasn't really aligned with their fundraising mission they also did quite a bit of scientific research on their flight a cool thing to do but also not really aligned with their mission there were some strange things on the SpaceX side as well they took one of their four crew Dragon capsules offline to make special modifications for the inspiration for flight including this large glass Koopa instead of the normal hatch this Koopa gave the crew a very unique view of the earth during the mission there was also some strangeness about the price the total cost of a crew dragon mission for NASA is about $360 million axium space missions to spend 8 Days on ISS supposedly cost 55 million per seat or 220 million total isaacman did not disclose the exact cost of inspiration 4 but he did say that it was less than 200 million this is confusing SpaceX did a lot of extra work on the capsule for this Mission