In a redesigned SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, four private astronauts launched into space early on Tuesday to begin the company’s five-day Polaris Dawn mission, which intends to test new spacesuit designs and perform the first-ever commercial spacewalk.
About 5:23 a.m. EST (0923 GMT), the crew—a retired military fighter pilot, a billionaire entrepreneur, and two SpaceX employees—launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
After the capsule entered orbit approximately nine and a half minutes later, the crew began to play with a small plush astronaut toy dog while they realized that they were in free fall, or zero gravity. Three minutes later, Crew Dragon broke free from its support trunk, providing an amazing vista of the capsule over the sunlit Earth, captured by onboard cameras.
“As you gaze toward the North Star, remember that your courage lights the map for future explorers,” SpaceX Launch Director Frank Messina told the crew by radio. “We trust your skills, your bravery, and your teamwork to carry out the mission ahead. … We are sending you hugs from the ground.”
The Falcon 9 rocket for the flight made a successful landing on a seaplane pad.
The fifth and riskiest private mission that Crew Dragon has undertaken yet. Eventually, the spacecraft will enter an oval-shaped orbit, traveling 1,400 km (870 miles) from Earth, the furthest any person has traveled since the U.S. Apollo moon program ended in 1972, and as close as 190 km (118 miles).
Due to a minor helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX’s launchpad, a launch mission last month was canceled hours before liftoff. The leak was eventually rectified by SpaceX, but the Polaris flight was further delayed when US regulators grounded the company’s Falcon 9 due to a booster recovery failure on an unrelated mission.
Spacewalks were previously limited to government astronauts with extensive funding and training. Since the station’s founding in 2000, there have been about 270 astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and 16 Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
SPACEWALK PLANNED FOR THIRD DAY
At 700 miles in height and lasting roughly 20 minutes, the Polaris Dawn spacewalk is scheduled for the third day of the mission. All four astronauts on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft, which lacks an airlock like the International Space Station, will depend on their customized spacesuits for oxygen as the craft gradually depressurizes its whole cabin.
Similar to the idea for Polaris Dawn, the first American spacewalk took place in 1965 onboard a Gemini capsule. The door opened, the capsule was depressurized, and an astronaut wearing a spacesuit went outside using a tether.
Like his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021, the 41-year-old pilot and wealthy entrepreneur of Shift4—an electronic payment company—is funding the Polaris expedition. The missions are probably going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but he has not disclosed the exact amount he is paying for them.
Together with him are two SpaceX employees, Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, who are both senior engineers at the firm, and mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired lieutenant colonel from the United States Air Force.
Poteet and Menon will remain in the cabin while Isaacman and Gillis, who are attached to an oxygen line, exit the spacecraft for the spacewalk.
The mission is the first in Isaacman’s private Polaris program, which also involves a future Crew Dragon mission and a flight on SpaceX’s Starship, a massive rocket that the company has been working on for billions of dollars as a flagship vehicle for the moon and Mars.
In addition to decades of research on astronauts living aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the four-person crew serves as effective test subjects for a variety of scientific experiments designed to shed light on how cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space impact the human body.
NASA has relied significantly on the business and its Crew Dragon since the Space Shuttle’s retirement in 2011. As the sole crew-grade vehicle in use in the United States, Crew Dragon has carried nine astronaut missions to and from the International Space Station on behalf of the agency.
Axiom Space, a mission broker located in Houston, arranged three of the company’s prior four private astronaut flights, including Isaacman’s Inspiration 4.
Boeing is having difficulty creating Starliner, a spacecraft that may compete with Crew Dragon. However, Starliner’s most recent NASA test mission, which started in June and was its first crewed flight, ended last week with its astronauts on the International Space Station due to problems with its propulsion system.
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