Four private astronauts blasted into space early on Sept. 10 in a modified SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, kicking off the company's five-day Polaris Dawn mission to test new spacesuit designs and conduct the first private spacewalk.
The crew, consisting of a billionaire entrepreneur, a former military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees, took off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida around 5:23 a.m. EST.
The capsule reached orbit after about nine and a half minutes, and the crew was circling the astronaut's small stuffed toy dog when free fall—weightlessness—became apparent. Three minutes later, Crew Dragon separated from the support trunk, and onboard cameras showed a breathtaking view of the capsule above the sunlit Earth.
“When you look at the North Star, remember that your courage illuminates the map for future explorers,” SpaceX launch director Frank Messina told the crew over radio. “We trust your skills, your courage and your teamwork to accomplish the mission ahead… We hug you from the ground up.”
The Falcon 9 mission's launch vehicle landed safely at the offshore site.
This is Crew Dragon's fifth and riskiest private mission to date. The spacecraft will eventually enter an oval-shaped orbit, traveling between 190 km (118 miles) and 1,400 km (870 miles) from Earth, the furthest humans have ventured since the end of the US Apollo lunar program in 1972.
Last month's launch attempt was delayed hours before liftoff due to a small helium leak in ground equipment at SpaceX's launch pad. SpaceX fixed the leak, but then U.S. regulators suspended the Falcon 9 launch due to a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch. Tuesday's launch was delayed by about two hours due to inclement weather.
In the past, only well-trained and well-funded government astronauts went into outer space. About 270 astronauts have boarded the International Space Station (ISS) since its inception in 2000, and 16 Chinese astronauts have boarded the Beijing Tiangong space station.
The spacewalk is scheduled for the third day
The Polaris Dawn spacewalk is scheduled for the third day of the mission at an altitude of 700 km and will last about 20 minutes. SpaceX's Crew Dragon will slowly depressurize its entire cabin—it doesn't have an airlock like the ISS—and all four astronauts will rely on their scaled-down spacesuits built by SpaceX for oxygen.
The first U.S. spacewalk took place in 1965 aboard the Gemini capsule, and it used a procedure similar to that planned for Polar Dawn: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch opened, and a spacesuited astronaut ventured out on a tether.
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is funding the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. He declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
He was joined by mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel; and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillies, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers at the company.
During the spacewalk, Mr. Isaacman and Ms. Gillies will leave the spacecraft tethered to an oxygen line, while Mr. Poteet and Ms. Menon will remain in the cabin.
The mission is the first in Mr. Isaacman's private Polaris program, which includes a follow-on Crew Dragon mission in the future followed by a flight on SpaceX's Starship, a giant rocket that the company has spent billions of dollars developing as a flagship to the Moon and Mars.
The four-person crew are essentially test subjects for a variety of scientific experiments that will aim to shed light on how cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space affect the human body, adding to decades of research by astronauts living aboard the ISS.
Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied heavily on the company and its Crew Dragon crew, which has flown nine astronaut missions to and from the ISS for the agency as the only operational crew-class vehicle in the United States.
The company has previously flown four private flights: Mr. Isaacman's Inspiration4 and three private astronaut flights organized by Houston-based mission broker Axiom Space.
Boeing is struggling to develop a similar Starliner spacecraft that could compete with the Crew Dragon. But NASA's latest Starliner test mission, which began in June – its first with a crew – left astronauts stranded on the ISS last week due to problems with its propulsion system.
This story was reported by Reuters.
