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If all goes according to plan, a crew of four will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX rocket next Monday to make history.
The five-day mission, funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, has several scientific goals, but the biggest and arguably riskiest is the first commercial spacewalk.
“Whatever risk it entails, it’s worth it,” Isaacman said during a news conference Monday.
It is the first in-flight test of SpaceX’s new streamlined extravehicular (EVA) spacesuit, based on its intravehicular suit.
But this spacewalk will be very different from the one we’re most familiar with. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule doesn’t have an airlock, so the entire spacecraft will be decompressed, with all four crew members testing out the new suits.
The crew includes Isaacman, CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company based in Pennsylvania; Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former Air Force colonel; Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer and astronaut trainer; and Anna Menon, another SpaceX engineer who also works in mission control.
The launch is scheduled for August 26 at 3:30 a.m. ET at the latest.
Isaacman and Gillis will perform the spacewalk 700 kilometers above Earth after three days of the mission.
“EVA is a risky adventure. But again, we’ve done everything we can to really prepare for this,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, who was NASA’s chief of human spaceflight until 2020. He’s now an engineer at SpaceX.
The mission has been in preparation for two and a half years.
“We’ve actually built on NASA’s legacy, but I think we’ve also extended NASA’s legacy a little bit further,” he said.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s ultimate goal is to colonize Mars, so the spacesuits are a necessary step.
“It’s not lost on us that it may be 10 iterations from now and a lot of evolutions of the suit, but that one day someone could wear a version that might walk on Mars,” Isaacman said. “And [it’s] “A huge honor to have the opportunity to test it out on this flight.”
Go bravely
Emmanuel Urquieta, vice chairman of the department of aerospace medicine at the University of Central Florida, said there is a lot of history supporting this historic spacewalk.
“I think the philosophy of these missions — Polaris Dawn and in general the Polaris Program — is to follow the same pattern as NASA’s Gemini programs,” he told CBC News. “We were developing a real space program where we were looking at one possibility after another, right, first demonstrate that you can do it.”
The first spacewalk in history was on March 18, 1965 by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. The US followed on June 3, 1965 with astronaut Ed White.
WATCH | Edward White’s First Spacewalk:
As with SpaceX’s upcoming spacewalk, there was no airlock, requiring the Gemini spacecraft to be depressurized.
But it’s not just about the spacewalk.
Several other scientific goals will be pursued, including reaching a much higher altitude orbit around the Earth than the International Space Station (ISS).
The ISS orbits at about 400 kilometers, but Polaris Dawn will orbit at 1,400 kilometers during the mission. The goal is to better understand the space radiation on the human body, since their orbit will take them partially out of the Van Allen belt, an area that protects us from this harmful radiation.
They will also study other aspects of space travel on the human body, as well as a new form of laser communication using Starlink satellites.
The crew members say they are looking forward to their mission.
“I think it will definitely have an impact on me. It already has. These last two and a half years have been absolutely impactful in the most incredible way,” mission specialist Anna Menon said at Monday’s news conference.
“I’ve spent years trying to put myself in the shoes of an astronaut in space, and I’m looking forward to experiencing first-hand what that’s like in practice.”
As for Isaacman, this will be his second flight. He flew on the first all-civilian Inspiration4 mission aboard a SpaceX capsule in 2021.
“Being in space [there was] “An unexpected moment where the moon came up while I was looking at Earth. I wasn’t expecting to see it and it was just, ‘Man, we just have to make this happen,'” Isaacman said of space exploration.
“You know, I wasn’t alive when people walked on the moon. I would definitely love for my kids to see people walk on the moon and Mars and explore our solar system.”
