SpaceX launches Polaris Dawn: Why mission is set to make history

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission launched today (September 10) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The mission, which will last six days, will see two of its crew make the world’s first privately managed spacewalk.

The spacewalk will occur on the third day.

But what do we know about the mission? Why will it be historic?

Let’s take a closer look:

What do we know?

The Elon Musk-run company is sending four people to Earth’s Orbit.

The astronauts are making the journey in the company’s Crew Dragon capsule.

Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions planned in the Polaris programme.

According to The Conversation, the trip is being powered by the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The Crew Dragon capsule is called Resilience.

As per Space.com, the four astronauts will be further from Earth than anyone has been since NASA wrapped up its Apollo missions.

The mission will not dock with the International Space Station (ISS).

Instead, the crew will orbit the Earth at an altitude of around 1,367 kilometres, as per The Conversation.

This is over thrice the distance from the Earth to the ISS – around 400 kilometers

The crew comprises billionaire Jared Isaacman, SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, and ex-US Air Force pilot Scott Poteet.

The Polaris Dawn mission has been faced repeated delays.

It was originally slated to launch in 2022, as per Moneycontrol.

Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of payments processing firm Shift4 Payments and a seasoned pilot, is commanding the Polaris Dawn mission.

Isaacman is bankrolling the mission under his Polaris program, although he declined to disclose the total expenditure, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

As per The Conversation, seats on previous Dragon capsules have gone for around $55 million.

The mission will be his second foray into space, following his leadership of the first all-civilian Inspiration4 mission to orbit Earth in 2021, organised and primarily funded by him in partnership with SpaceX.

After Polaris Dawn, Isaacman has two more missions planned under the Polaris program – another flight on Crew Dragon followed by a flight on Starship, SpaceX’s next-generation rocket under development. He has not announced crewmates or dates for those flights.

“We don’t get the freedom of any time of day to launch but I think it’ll work out to [be] pretty close to dawn, which is very appropriate given the mission,” Isaacman told CNBC’s Investing in Space last month.

As per The Conversation, Polaris Dawn will be sending communications back and forth to Earth through the Starlink satellites.

The program is set to undertake around 40 experiments including seeing how the human body reacts in low-gravity environments and measuring the radiation the capsule receives.

The walk to make history

Two of the mission’s four-member crew will head out of their Crew Dragon capsule in Earth’s orbit for a tethered spacewalk – also known as extravehicular activity (EVA).

Isaacman and Gillis – Polaris Dawn’s mission specialist – will be the ones making history.

As per The Conversation, the astronauts will have to reduce their altitude to around 400 kilometres during the space walk.

This is to reduce their radiation exposure.

Space.com quoted Isaacman as saying the spacewalk would take around two hours.

This is historic because spacewalks, which are extremely risky, have thus far have only been made by government astronauts.

However, the actual spacewalk itself won’t take longer than 49 minutes.

Isaacman and Gillis will walk separately.

They will likely each spend around 15 to 20 minutes outside the Crew Dragon capsule, team members told the website.

Isaacman told Space.com not to expect anything like Ed White’s 1965 spacewalk – the first by a US astronaut.

“The Ed White photo is historic, but I think, as you know, Buzz Aldrin taught us that’s not the right way to do an EVA,” Isaacman said.

“We’re just not going to be just floating around,” he added.

Isaacman said he understands the gravity of the EVA.

“The only thing that comes close to that is the vacuum chamber, and that’s where you’re pretty much feeling as close as it’s like to be in the vacuum conditions or space. … That definitely gives you the actual sensations of the pressure changes and the temperature changes, as well as just the psychological stressors of being in a very harsh environment,” Isaacman told CNBC.

But the astronauts are as well prepared as they can be.

Gillis, for example, has trained NASA astronauts for several operations, including International Space Stations Dragon missions Demo-2 and Crew-1 and Inspiration4 mission in 2021.

Gillis began her career at Space X in 2015 after graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder with an engineering degree.

She is now the company’s senior space operations engineer. Her responsibilities include training astronauts on safety and flight operations.

SpaceX’s spacesuits set to be tested

The trip also marks the first major test of SpaceX’s new spacesuits.

As per CNBC, SpaceX has spent the past few years building its EVA suit from its intravehicular activity (IVA) suit.

Though Poteet and Menon aren’t doing the spacewalk, they will be watching carefully.

This is because the Crew Dragon capsule lacks an airlock and will completely depressurise for the spacewalk.

Which means all four crew members including Poteet and Menon will need to rely on their suits to survive.

“It’ll look like we’re doing a little bit of a dance. And what that is, we’re going through a series of test matrix on the suit,” Isaacman was quoted as saying by Space.com. “The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about the suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions.”

“It’s not lost on us that, you know, it might be 10 iterations from now and a bunch of evolutions of the suit, but that, someday, someone could be wearing a version of which that might be walking on Mars,” Isaacman said.

“And it feels like, again, a huge honour to have that opportunity to test it out on this flight.”

Experts say the mission is a big deal.

As Wendy Whitman Cobb noted in The Conversation, “If successful, this mission will show that private companies are working on developing the capabilities needed to go to the Moon or Mars.”

“Like many of SpaceX’s activities, Polaris Dawn is ambitious, but it is necessary for the company’s future plans. Before SpaceX can run to Mars, it must first walk – or spacewalk, to be more precise,” Cobb wrote.

With inputs from agencies