Four astronauts blasted off from the atmosphere as part of a privately funded five-day mission aimed at performing the first commercial spacewalk.
Jared Isaacman, the American billionaire founder of the electronic payments company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris Dawn mission and acting as crew commander.
This is the second trip Isaacman has charted. In 2021 he has on the Inspiration4 missionthe first orbital spaceflight by an everyday crew, which included a cancer survivor as well as a data engineer who won his seat in a lottery.
Isaacman, who has thousands of hours in various aircraft, is accompanied this time by a retired military fighter pilot and two employees of SpaceXthe company owned by Elon Musk, which operates the mission.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Space Center in Florida Tuesday morning after several delays. A previous attempt to launch last month was delayed hours before liftoff after a small helium leak on the launch pad. It was later pushed back further when the same make of rocket was temporarily grounded for inspection by US regulators.
The trip will last about five days and take an oval-shaped orbit that moves as far as 870 miles (1,400 km) from Earth’s surface.
“Crew safety is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual as it will be the furthest humans have traveled from Earth since Apollo, and the first commercial spacewalk,” Musk wrote of the mission last month on his social media site, X.
Polaris Dawn will travel to an altitude of 1,400 km, attempt the first commercial spacewalk from Dragon, test Starlink laser-based communications, and conduct a wide range of research in microgravity before returning to Earth and splashing down off the coast of Florida. pic.twitter.com/X4kGksg3Rd
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 10, 2024
Only well-funded government agencies have so far managed to carry out spacewalks, known as EVAs (extra-vehicular activities), and this is a notoriously difficult feat. Most were done from the International Space Station (ISS) and the Chinese Tiangong Space Station.
Polaris Dawn’s spacewalk is planned for the mission’s third day at an altitude of 435 miles and will last about 20 minutes. Since SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft has no airlock, all four astronauts will wear SpaceX-designed spacesuits while the entire cabin is depressurized. Isaacman, 41, and SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis, 30, will exit the spacecraft tethered by an oxygen line.
SpaceX’s manned missions are part of Musk’s plan to take astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars, which he plans to “colonize.” The company is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, called Starshipand conducted four test flights of the 120 meter high system.
Over the next five days, Polaris Dawn’s crew will actually act as test subjects for future deep space travel by traveling through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt and then analyzing the effects of space radiation on their bodies.
Private companies are gradually taking the lead in spaceflight as governments, and especially the US government, seek to spend tax revenues elsewhere. NASA did SpaceX contracted to land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moon this decade.
SpaceX’s competitors include Boeing, although it has its spacecraft, Starliner recently experienced problems and had to get two Nasa astronauts stuck on the ISS. Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore began what was supposed to be a one-week mission in June, but thrust failures and helium leaks on Starliner meant it returned without a crew. Williams and Wilmore will remain on the space station until February.
