SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn Finally Launches Its Historic Mission
The Polaris Dawn mission blasted off this morning from Kennedy Space Center following multiple delays from its intended August 26 launch, including a helium leak on the launchpad and several weeks of poor weather.
Today’s launch was flawless, a sequence of events that included the rocket being fueled on launchpad 39A (which hosted most of the historic Apollo missions), the 5:23 a.m. blastoff, separation of the first and second stages two minutes, 40 seconds later, and 12 minutes after launch, the separation of the Crew Dragon capsule from the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage. The capsule, flying above Earth, headed toward the sunrise. Loud cheers were heard multiple times at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, via X (formerly known as Twitter), which live-streamed the launch.
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The four-astronaut mission, financed by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who will serve as commander of the Crew Dragon Capsule named Resilience, will be very unlike his first Inspiration4 orbit of the Earth three years ago. That two-day flight in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) was the first with only private citizens aboard and no professional astronauts. The capsule was piloted remotely by SpaceX’s mission control.
Polaris Dawn is a much more ambitious and potentially risky five-day mission. It was announced in February 2022, with an expected launch by the end of that year. The timeline changed repeatedly over the next two years as SpaceX engineers built more safety components into the flight.
If today’s flight goes as planned, the Dragon Resilience capsule will travel farther and higher into space than any other spacecraft since the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon in 1972. It will include the first civilian spacewalk. The mission’s apogee, or farthest point from the Earth, will be 870 miles, 17 miles higher than the 1966 record for non-lunar spaceflights.
Polaris Dawn’s other crew members include Scott “Kidd” Poteet as mission pilot, mission specialist Sarah Gillis and medical officer Anna Menon. Gillis, who will be joining Isaacman on the spacewalk, and Menon, a space operations engineer, are both employees of SpaceX.
“There’s always a risk calculus to it,” Isaacman told The New York Times, noting that the costs of the mission were shared with SpaceX, without revealing financial details. “But the real focus is on what we stand to gain and learn from it.”
The crew will conduct about 40 experiments as well as encounter potential challenges. Those include passing through intense belts radiation that will be equal to what astronauts on the International Space Station are exposed to over three months. There is also possibility of the capsule being bombarded by tiny space rocks.
The mission will gather scientific data on the impact of space travel on the human body, while also testing new technologies such as sending communications by laser pulse rather than radio waves, or creating X-rays without an X-ray machine by using the encountered radiation. “We have some pretty ambitious objectives,” Isaacman said.
Perhaps the most ambitious is the spacewalk on day three at 435 miles above the Earth, when all four crew will put on spacesuits, depressurize the cabin, and open the door—there is no airlock on the capsule—at which point Isaacman and Gillis, tethered to the spacecraft by umbilical cords, will move outside Resilience to test the suits. Poteet and Menon will remain inside, watching displays and managing the umbilical cords.
The new spacesuits are based on pressure suits worn by astronauts on previous Crew Dragon Flights but are specifically designed for spacewalks. The suits’ joints remain soft until pressurized, so movement is more flexible. The suits will also have enhanced thermal management for comfort. The helmet has an exterior coating to protect against sun glare, with a camera and heads-up display showing information on the status of the suit.
“This is going to be a significant milestone,” Musk said, when he displayed the spacesuits in May. “Having a high-mobility spacesuit that isn’t crazy expensive, ideally, and that you can walk around in comfortably is a great deal. It’s an important thing that needs to be developed and ultimately made in large numbers.”
The end of the five-day mission will come with a splashdown off the Florida coast.
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