The signature SpaceX It is scheduled to launch on August 26 from the Kennedy Space Center in Floridathe Polaris Dawn mission, a manned flight to Earth orbit that includes among its objectives the performance of the first private spacewalk in history.
The Polaris Dawn program will send four people into Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which will take off (“no earlier than August 26”) from the Kennedy Space Center in the POT in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the US space firm said Wednesday.
The mission crew will “spend up to five days in orbit during which they will work to achieve,” among other objectives, “flying higher than any other Dragon mission” to date and “attempting to reach the highest Earth orbit ever achieved.”
At about 435 miles from Earth, putting the crew farther from Earth than any mission since the Apollo era, the mission will attempt “the first commercial astronaut spacewalk,” for which they will also use upgraded spacesuits designed by SpaceX, Polaris Dawn said on its website.
“To build a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require millions of spacesuits. The development of this suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary.”the Polaris Dawn program highlighted.
The four-member crew are billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, who will command the mission; pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel; and mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both SpaceX engineers.
The Polaris Dawn spacecraft will carry the quartet into Earth orbit on a mission that is not linked to the International Space Station (EEI).
Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned crewed missions in the Polaris Program, all of which will use SpaceX hardware.
Isaacman will command and fund all three flights, as he did with Inspiration4, SpaceX’s pioneering mission to Earth orbit in September 2021.
Polaris Dawn was originally scheduled to launch in 2022, a date that has been postponed several times, in part due to “the pioneering complexity of the mission,” highlighted the digital publication Space.com.
SpaceX already has one manned mission in orbit right now, Crew-8, which sent four astronauts to the ISS last March for a six-month stint.
The Crew-8 crew will be replaced by astronauts from Crew-9, whose launch was initially scheduled for August 18 and will now take place on September 24.