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Jared Isaacman, 41, the CEO of Shift4 Payments in Allentown, PA is the mission commander of SpaceX's mission Polaris Dawn, which launched into space on Tuesday morning, Sept. 10.
Alongside Isaacman are Retired US Air Force Lt. Col Scott "Kidd" Potee, and two SpaceX specialists, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. You can read more about the mission on the SpaceX website here.
Isaacman founded Shift4 at just 16 years old in the basement of his parents' home, according to his bio on the Shift4 website. Various news reports say he had just dropped out of Ridge High School in Somerset County, NJ.
Motivated to achieve the lifestyle of his older siblings ages 27 and 30, Isaacman and one of his friends created a small website-design company for local businesses, Forbes reports. That was in 1998. The following year, he launched United Bank Card, a company designed to make credit card processing even faster for businesses. The company is now called Shift4, and is the world's leading payment processing solutions company with a market capital of more than 6.7 billion.
While working on building the company that would become Shift4, Isaacman began flying prop planes, slowly moving up to jets. He was just 26 when he broke the record for fastest flight in a light jet around the world to-and-from Morristown in 61 hours and 51 minutes, Forbes said.
In 2011, Isaacman co-founded Draken International, the largest private airforce training pilots for the U.S. armed forces.
Ten years later, Isaacman served as the commander of Inspiration4, SpaceX's first private human spaceflight. The flight helped raise over $240 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®, the SpaceX website says.
The crew was featured in a Netflix documentary called "Countdown: Inspiration4 Mission To Space."
Now, on Polaris Dawn, Isaacman and the crew will be the first to test Starlink's laser-based communications from space, according to the SpaceX website. NASA says they will also be performing "essential health and human performance research" for NASA’s Human Research Program.
The rocket launch was captured by residents across the East Coast Tuesday morning, including by several people in New Jersey.
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