When NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman was 12, he attended the “Aviation Challenge” program at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, and apparently it left a mark. “For the first time, I got behind the controls of an airplane when I attended Aviation Challenge,” Isaacman said Friday evening at the US Space & Rocket Center. “I became a pilot because I thought that was the closest I would ever get to the stars.” Fast forward a few decades, a successful online payments company, and two private trips to space aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon, and Isaacman has returned to Space Camp multiple times to share the awe - and, more tangibly, his money. In 2022, a year after his Inspiration4 flight, he donated $10 million to kick off an expansion. Now, as NASA's top boss, he's doubling down: he donates his salary to Space Camp, and on Friday he opened the new “Inspiration4 Skills Training Complex,” a 50,000-square-foot facility funded by an additional $15 million from Isaacman. The money will also support a new dormitory.
Space Camp has been a quirky slice of American culture since the 1986 film Space Camp, where four teenagers befriended a robot and accidentally launched into orbit - a plot so implausible it was criticized for coming out just months after the Challenger catastrophe. Yet the movie helped build the myth, and since its opening four years earlier, over 900,000 kids ages 9 to 18 have “graduated.” Among them are at least half a dozen NASA astronauts, including Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, Kate Rubins, Serena Auñón-Chancellor, and Christina Koch, a mission specialist on the recently flown Artemis II mission. The exhibits were starting to show their age, but Isaacman's gift should help - think a parachute simulation room with a virtual-reality 10,000-foot drop and wind simulation, a drone lab, interactive mission control, and zero-gravity training simulators.
Apparently, Artemis II - flown by Koch and three others - has done more than just orbit the Moon. Space Camp officials say registrations have doubled this summer since the successful lunar flyby mission in April. With NASA returning to the Moon and establishing habitats, interest is expected to grow. “Off the success of Artemis II, America’s return to the Moon is just getting going,” Isaacman said at the ribbon-cutting. “And it is that kind of magic that inspires the next generation to attend Space Camp, get hands-on experiences at this national treasure, unlike anywhere else in the country, and grow up ready to pick up the baton and join in this great adventure.” Or, you know, just become a pilot first.