Polaris Dawn Mission Launch Date, Details

SpaceX is preparing to launch its next private mission later this month, which will represent its first attempt to send astronauts into space.

The Polaris Dawn mission, the first of three billion-dollar flights and Move4 founder Jared Isaacman purchased from SpaceX in 2022 for his human spaceflight project known as the Polaris program, which is scheduled to launch from Florida in the early hours of August 26.

“We don’t have the freedom to choose any time for the launch, but I think it will work. [be] “Pretty close to sunrise, which is very appropriate given the mission,” Isaacman told Vscek’s Vscek in Space in an interview last month.

Isaacman will command the mission, as he did during the historic Inspiration4 flight in 2021. He will once again lead a crew of four, with longtime colleague Scott Poteet serving as pilot and Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, two SpaceX employees, serving as the flight’s medical officer and mission specialist, respectively.

The multi-day journey has no specific destination, but will instead be a free-flying mission that will chart orbits that the crew hopes will take them far from Earth.

“We’re reaching a very high altitude, where humans haven’t been in over 50 years,” Isaacman said.

But the heart of Polaris Dawn is the planned spacewalk.

Extravehicular activities, or EVAs, have been a regular part of NASA astronaut missions for years, such as when the agency needs maintenance outside the International Space Station. But no private company has ever attempted an EVA before.

Isaacman said he understood that taking a spacewalk meant he and his crew would be “surrounded by death,” a moment for which they had trained extensively.

“The only thing that comes close to that is the vacuum chamber, and that’s where you feel about as close to being in a vacuum or in space as you feel. … That definitely gives you the real sensations of pressure changes and temperature changes, as well as the psychological stresses of being in a very harsh environment,” Isaacman said.

Isaacman also detailed the daily schedule for Polaris Dawn, which will remain in space for up to five days.

The first day is all about finding a time when the risk of orbital debris from micrometeorites is minimal, which will determine exactly when Polaris Dawn launches. After reaching a 190-kilometer by 1,200-kilometer orbit, Isaacman said the crew will perform extensive checks of the SpaceX Resilience Dragon capsule.

“It’s really important to make sure the vehicle doesn’t have any failures before it reaches an altitude of 1,400 kilometers,” Isaacman said.

The spacecraft will also pass early through the high radiation zone known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

“The ideal would be to do it as low as possible because even at 200 kilometers the radiation level is substantially higher… Our two or three high-altitude passes through the South Atlantic Anomaly will represent almost the entire radiation load of the mission and will be equivalent to three months on the International Space Station,” Isaacman said.

The second day will focus on some of the science and research that Polaris Dawn intends to do, which will include about 40 experiments. The crew will also prepare for the spacewalk, testing the EVA suits.

“So we can be confident that… there’s nothing unexpected about microgravity compared to what we’ve been able to test on Earth,” Isaacman said.

The third day is the most important one: the EVA.

Who on the crew will perform the spacewalk?

“We would say we’re doing all four: There’s no airlock and the air is vented into a vacuum” inside the spacecraft, Isaacman said.

Two crew members will travel outside the Dragon: Isaacman and Gillis, while Poteet and Menon will remain inside as support.

The EVA is expected to last two hours from start to finish. Isaacman stressed that the spacewalk “is really a test and development process.”

“We want to learn as much as we can about the suit and how it works, but we only have so much oxygen and nitrogen to work with,” Isaacman said.

Polaris Dawn plans to livestream the spacewalk, and the mission commander noted that there will be “a lot of cameras” inside and outside the capsule.

The key equipment that will make EVA possible are SpaceX spacesuits.

The company has spent the last two years taking its minimalist, black-and-white IVA suit, which is for intravehicular activity and worn by astronauts in emergencies, and using it to create its EVA suit. Isaacman said the EVA suits are the result of hundreds of hours of testing different materials over the years.

“So our main goal is to find out as much as we can about the suit,” Isaacman said.

“It’s all about building the next generation. We’re continuing to iterate on this suit design so that SpaceX can have hundreds or thousands of them one day for the moon, Mars, working in [low Earth orbit]What do you think? Building a new EVA suit is not an easy task,” he added.

Polaris Dawn aims to push the boundaries of private spaceflight, and like his first trip into orbit, Isaacman hopes the mission will be inspirational.

“That’s the inspiring part… anything that’s different from what we’ve seen in the last 20 or 30 years is what excites people, who think, ‘Well, if this is what I see today, I wonder what it’s going to be like tomorrow or a year later.’”

Read Isaacman’s Q&A on Vscek’s Vscek in Space newsletter here.