Elon Musk’s SpaceX is still committed to launching the first commercial spacewalk after an initial delay. Named Polaris Dawn, the spaceflight was due to launch from Florida on Monday (August 26) but has been postponed due to bad weather.
The flight is the first of three missions planned by billionaire and Shift4 founder Jared Isaacman, who bought the Space X flights in 2022. Isaacman said Polaris Dawn was aiming to “push the boundaries of private spaceflight and inspire” but no official date of launch has been made public.
He said: ““This is the inspirational side of it … anything that’s different than what we’ve seen over the last 20 or 30 years is what gets people excited, thinking: ’Well if this is what I’m seeing today, I wonder what tomorrow’s going to look like or a year after.”
A spokesperson for Space X spoke of the delays on social media platform X on Tuesday, writing: "Due to unfavourable weather forecasted in Dragon's splashdown areas off the coast of Florida, we are now standing down. Teams will continue to monitor weather for favourable launch and return conditions.”
Musk previously described the upcoming mission as “epic”.
First SpaceX spacewalk mission launches in a week. This will be epic. https://t.co/U9OSmDR2ti
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 18, 2024
When is the Polaris Dawn mission happening?
Polaris Dawn was set to launch from Florida in the early hours of Monday, August 26 but delays got in the way.
SpaceX originally pushed things back a day to perform more preflight checkouts. The company then called the August 27 attempt off after detecting a helium leak, but now bad weather has got in the way and now nothing will happen until “at least August 30”, but no official date has been made public.
Isaacman told CNBC’s Investing in Space during an interview last month: “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.”
Who is going into space?
The four-person crew comprises of Shift4 founder Isaacman, his colleague Scott Poteet, and a pair of SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.
Poteet will pilot, while Menon and Gillis will serve as the flight’s medical officer and mission specialist.
The multi-day trip isn’t headed to a destination, but instead will be a free-flying mission tracing orbits that the crew hopes will be far from Earth.
Isaacman added: “We’re going to a very high altitude that humans haven’t gone to in 50-plus years.”
What are they doing there?
There is a five-day mission plan, which will include astronauts leaving the spaceship to undertake a planned spacewalk.
Their orbital path in the Dragon capsule will extend into the solar radiation belt, adding another element of danger. It is something humans will have to overcome if they are to travel to Mars.Isaacman said the team understood that, by going for a spacewalk, they would be “surrounded by death”.
On day one, the crew will reach an orbit of 190km (118 miles) and then undertake extensive checks of the ship, SpaceX’s Dragon capsule named Resilience. The boundary of space begins around 80km (50 miles). The Polaris Dawn crew aim to travel as high as 870 miles (1,400km) from Earth.
Isaacman said: “It’s really important to know that the vehicle has no faults before going up to 1,400km altitude.”
Day two will focus on some of the science and research that Polaris Dawn plans to accomplish, which will total about 40 experiments. The crew will also prep for the spacewalk, testing out the innovative EVA (extra-vehicular activity) suits.
On day three, the team plans to undertake the spacewalk, with only Isaacman and Gillis exiting the spacecraft, tethered by a couple of life-support umbilicals.
Polaris Dawn plans to livestream the spacewalk, and the mission commander emphasised that there are going to be “a lot of cameras” scattered inside and outside the capsule.
The rest of the time will be spent collating the data they find and then coming back to Earth.
The goal of the Polaris program is to develop technology that SpaceX will one day need if it carries humans further into space, including spacesuits, EVA, and life-support technologies. The crew will also test Starlink laser-based communications.
