SpaceX set to launch billionaire’s private crew on breakthrough spacewalk mission

Last month’s launch attempt was aborted hours before launch due to a small helium leak in ground equipment [File]
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A team of four private astronauts was in the final stages of preparation Tuesday for SpaceX’s risky mission, attempting the first-ever private spacewalk using the company’s new spacesuits and redesigned spacecraft.

A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees are set for launch at 3:38 a.m. ET (0738 GMT) aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the spacecraft’s fifth — and riskiest — private space mission ever.

Last month’s launch attempt was postponed hours before launch because of a small helium leak in ground equipment at SpaceX’s launchpad. SpaceX fixed the leak, but the company’s Falcon 9 was grounded by US regulators because of a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch.

After receiving permission to resume Falcon 9 flights, the Polaris mission is now set for an early morning launch on Tuesday, but there is only a 40% chance of favorable weather, according to US Space Force launch weather modeling. SpaceX has other launch opportunities on Tuesday at 5:23 a.m. and 7:09 a.m.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote about the mission on his social media site SpaceX last month, “Crew safety is paramount and this mission carries greater risk than usual as it will be the farthest human flight from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spaceflight.”

Only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have performed spacewalks in the past. There have been about 270 astronaut spacewalks on the International Space Station (ISS) since its construction in 2000, and 16 astronaut spacewalks by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.

The SpaceX mission, called Polaris Dawn, will last about five days in an elliptical orbit, going as close as 190 km (118 miles) to Earth and as far as 1,400 km (870 miles) away, the furthest distance flown by any human since the end of the United States’ Apollo moon programme in 1972.

The spacewalk is planned for the third day of the mission at an altitude of 700 kilometers and will last about 20 minutes. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft will slowly depressurize its entire cabin – it has no airlock like the ISS – and all four astronauts will rely on their thin, SpaceX-built spacesuits for oxygen.

America’s first spacewalk was conducted in 1965 in a Gemini capsule, and used a procedure similar to that planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch opened, and an astronaut in a spacesuit was lowered using a rope.

Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is funding the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. He has declined to say how much he is paying for the mission, but it is likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

He is joined by mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, who are both senior engineers at the company.

For the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft tethered to an oxygen line, while Poteat and Menon will remain in the cabin.

The mission is the first in Isaacman’s private Polaris program, which includes a follow-on Crew Dragon mission in the future followed by flights on SpaceX’s Starship, a huge rocket the company has spent billions of dollars to develop as a prime Moon and Mars vehicle.

The four-member crew are effectively test subjects for a series of scientific experiments aimed at shedding light on how cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space affect the human body, and will complement decades of studies on astronauts living aboard the ISS.

Since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied heavily on the company and its Crew Dragon, which has flown nine astronauts to and from the ISS for the agency and is the only U.S. crew-grade vehicle in operation.

The company has previously flown four private missions: Isaacman’s Inspiration4, and three private astronaut flights organized by Houston-based mission broker Axiom Space.

Boeing has been struggling to develop a similar spacecraft, the Starliner, that could rival the Crew Dragon. But Starliner’s latest NASA test mission, which launched in June and marked its first time flying with a crew, left its astronauts on the ISS last week because of problems with its propulsion system.