Four private astronauts blasted into space early on Tuesday in a modified SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. This kicked off the company’s five-day Polaris Dawn mission, which aims to test new spacesuit designs and conduct the first private spacewalk.
The crew, a billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees, lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida about 5:23 a.m. EST. Flight controllers noted that the Falcon 9 booster had cleared the launch tower.
It is Crew Dragon’s fifth – and riskiest – private mission so far. After reaching space a few minutes after launch, the spacecraft will settle into an oval-shaped orbit. It will pass as close to Earth as 190 km (118 miles) and as far as 1,400 km (870 miles). This is the farthest any humans will have ventured since the end of the U.S. Apollo moon program in 1972.
Failed Attempt
An attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before liftoff over a small helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX’s launchpad. SpaceX fixed the leak, however, the company’s Falcon 9 was then grounded by U.S. regulators over a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch.
The launch on Tuesday was delayed about two hours because of unfavourable weather.
Only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have done spacewalks in the past. There have been roughly 270 on the International Space Station (ISS) since its creation in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
The Polaris Dawn spacewalk is planned for the mission’s third day at 700 km in altitude and will last about 20 minutes. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft will slowly depressurize its entire cabin. It has no airlock like the ISS – and all four astronauts will rely on their slimmed-down, SpaceX-built spacesuits for oxygen.
The Crew
Jared Isaacman is a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payment company Shift4. He is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. He declined to say how much he is paying for the missions. However, it is likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Joining him is mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel; and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers at the company.
For the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft tethered by an oxygen line. Poteet and Menon will stay in the cabin.
The mission is the first in Isaacman’s private Polaris program that includes a follow-on Crew Dragon mission in the future. It was followed by a flight on SpaceX’s Starship, a giant rocket the company developed as a flagship moon and Mars vehicle.
The four-person crew are effectively test subjects for an array of scientific experiments that will aim to shed light on how cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space affect the human body, adding to decades of studies on astronauts living aboard the ISS.
SpaceX Missions
Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied heavily on the company and its Crew Dragon, which has flown nine astronaut missions to and from the ISS for the agency as the only U.S. crew-grade vehicle in operation.
The company has previously flown four private missions. These were Isaacman’s Inspiration4, and three private astronaut flights arranged by Houston-based mission broker Axiom Space.
Boeing is struggling to develop a similar spacecraft, Starliner, that could rival Crew Dragon. But Starliner’s latest NASA test mission that began in June left its astronauts on the ISS last week because of issues with its propulsion system. This was its first time flying a crew.
(with inputs from Reuters)
