SpaceX Polaris crew set for first private spacewalk next week
The four-person crew of SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission arrived in Florida on Monday in preparation for their Aug. 26 launch into space. The mission will include the first privately organized spacewalk, a risky undertaking that has historically only been attempted by government astronauts.
The crew, which includes a billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees, was nearly finished with two years of training for the mission, which will see them leave their Crew Dragon capsule in orbit for a spacewalk.
The mission is a key first test of SpaceX’s new astronaut spacesuits and marks the latest risky, commercial milestone Elon Musk’s space company aims to achieve in its quest to eventually build colonies on Mars.
“Whatever risk it entails, it’s worth it,” said mission commander Jared Isaacman, CEO of electronic payments company Shift4, who also heads the SpaceX-affiliated Polaris program.
“We have no idea what this could really mean for a change in the course of humanity… some initial steps have to be taken in that direction,” Isaacman told reporters at a news conference on Monday.
Isaacman is funding the mission and others under his Polaris program. He declined to say how much he has spent on the missions so far, but the total is said to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The financial investment in developing SpaceX’s new spacesuits was “shared within the Polaris team and within SpaceX,” SpaceX Vice Chairman Bill Gerstenmaier told reporters.
Launch is scheduled for 3:38 a.m. ET (0738 GMT) on Aug. 26 from SpaceX’s launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission is expected to last six days, with the spacewalk — formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA) — scheduled for the third day.
The rest of the Polaris Dawn crew includes mission pilot Scott Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who also served on the Inspiration4 mission.
SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both Lead Space Operations Engineers at the company, will become mission specialists.
Crew Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, so the entire cabin will be slowly decompressed for the spacewalk, meaning all four astronauts will test out the new spacesuits. But only two, Isaacman and Gillis, will float outside the spacecraft.
Only government astronauts from the US, the former Soviet Union and Russia, the European Space Agency, Canada and China have conducted spacewalks. With US and Russian spacesuits, more than 270 spacewalks have been conducted outside the International Space Station since its inception in 2000.
“EVA is a risky adventure. But again, we’ve done everything we can to really prepare for this,” said Gerstenmaier, who served as NASA’s chief of human spaceflight until 2020.
“We’ve actually built on NASA’s legacy, but I think we’ve also extended NASA’s legacy a little bit further,” Gerstenmaier said.
SpaceX uses its Crew Dragon capsule to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS for NASA, but the company also aims to organize privately funded space flights that feature new milestones with each mission.
Isaacman’s first mission, Inspiration4 in 2021, was the first fully civilian, privately funded flight into Earth orbit. SpaceX said this month it plans to launch the first crew to orbit Earth from pole to pole next year, with a multinational crew.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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