The human saga in space continues unabated with the launch of the four-person Polaris Dawn mission.
Launched early yesterday, it is already making some spaceflight history as it is flying in the highest orbit ever achieved, higher than the 1966 Gemini Eleven record.
Polaris Dawn, which will also attempt to conduct the first-ever private spacewalk, was launched atop a SpaceX Falcon from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
Space.com reported:
“The launch was originally supposed to occur on Aug. 26, but SpaceX stood down from that attempt to perform more preflight checks. A try the following day was nixed after the mission team detected a helium leak in the equipment supporting the Falcon 9. The liftoff was then delayed multiple times by bad weather before Mother Nature finally relented [yesterday].”
The booster separated from the second stage as planned, and after that, Polaris Dawn’s Crew Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9’s upper stage a little over 12 minutes after launch.
“‘We wouldn’t be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back home and everyone else cheering us on’, billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who commands and funds Polaris Dawn, told SpaceX mission control shortly after Crew Dragon deployed into orbit. ‘We appreciate it. We’re gonna get to work now’.
The capsule settled into an initial elliptical orbit with a maximum altitude (apogee) of about 745 miles (1,200 kilometers), with the minimum altitude (perigee) holding at about 118 miles (190 km). After a few orbits, Crew Dragon [has raised] its apogee to about 870 miles (1,400 km) — higher than any human has flown since the final Apollo mission in 1972.”
Billionaire Isaacman is joined by SpaceX employees, mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, as well as retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Scott ‘Kidd’ Poteet, who serves as mission pilot.
The quartet is expected to spend the next five days in space, and will also conduct the most critical part of its mission: history’s first commercial spacewalk.
“The EVA (extravehicular activity) will take place on the third day of the mission. A chief goal of the operation is to test out SpaceX’s new EVA spacesuit, which is visually similar to the company’s familiar black-and-white IVA (intravehicular activity) suit, which is worn only inside the spacecraft.”
Crew Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, the capsule’s interior will be exposed to the vacuum of space, so the crewmembers will therefore all suit up during the spacewalk, though only Isaacman and Gillis will perform the extravehicular activity.
The Polaris Dawn EVA will last about two hours.
The mission will also include a Starlink demonstration, an ‘exciting surprise message’ transmitted to Earth via SpaceX’s megaconstellation of internet satellites.
Polaris Dawn’s Dragon is expected to parachute into the ocean off the coast of Florida, where a recovery ship will retrieve the spacecraft and crew.
Jared Isaacman, the commander and funder of the mission, became a billionaire after he took his payment-processing Shift4 public in 2020, with a net worth to $2.3 billion, according to Forbes.
In 2011, he founded Draken International, a defense firm that trains US Air Force pilots.
New York Post reported:
“After achieving the status of billionaire, Isaacman sought to take his airborne trips even further by funding and leading the first civilian mission to space aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule.
The three-day trip to space was estimated by Florida Today to have cost as much as $200 million, with Isaacman setting a record by being the first space tourist to circle the Earth without having a professional astronaut aboard.”
Isaacman has since purchased a total of three trips to return to space from Elon Musk, with the first being the present Polaris Dawn mission.
“’I wasn’t alive when humans walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars and venturing out and exploring our solar system’, Isaccman said.”
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