SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The orbital expedition features the first spacewalk by non-professional astronauts and aims to fly further from Earth than any manned mission since NASA’s Apollo flights. The four-member crew is led by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
Unlike his previous flight, the billionaire with a penchant for space exploration shared the costs with SpaceX, which developed and tested new spacesuits to verify their tightness in absolute vacuum.
If all goes as planned, it will be the first time private citizens have performed a ‘spacewalk’, but they will not venture far from the capsule.
Considered one of the riskiest parts of space flight, spacewalks have been the exclusive preserve of professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union opened the first spacecraft hatch in 1965, followed closely by the United States. Today they are routinely carried out on the International Space Station.
Isaacman, along with a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, halfway through the five-day mission.
But first the passengers will be projected far beyond the International Space Station, to an altitude of 1,400 kilometers, thus surpassing the record for flight from Earth set during NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon they went further.
The plan is to spend 10 hours at that altitude – filled with extreme radiation and debris – before reducing the orbit by half. Even at a lower altitude of 700 kilometers, the orbit would surpass the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest point the Shuttle astronauts have flown.
All four “space tourists” are wearing suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk.
SpaceX’s Isaacman and Sarah Gillis will briefly take turns exiting the hatch and putting their custom black and white suits to the test. Both will always have a hand or foot in contact with the capsule or the attached support structure that resembles the top of a pool ladder.
