SpaceX has blasted off a crew of four private astronauts for the first-ever private spacewalk.
A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees are using the company’s new spacesuits and a redesigned spacecraft for the mission which launched on Tuesday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
It is the riskiest private space mission so far – only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have done spacewalks in the past.
An attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before lift-off over a small helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX’s launchpad.
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The company fixed the leak, but its Falcon 9 was then grounded by US regulators over a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch.
Risky Polaris mission is neccesary if Musk wants a city on Mars
Astronauts need courage, and never more so than on the Polaris Dawn mission now in orbit around the Earth.
The four crew members are all civilians. Only one has ever been to space before. Just once.
And if that wasn’t enough, the SpaceX Dragon capsule will take them further from Earth than anybody since the Apollo missions, through radiation belts around the planet.
Then the crew will attempt the first spacewalk by private astronauts, testing a new suit in the vacuum of space, from a spacecraft that doesn’t even have an airlock.
The mission is so full of risk it’s a wonder it ever got insurance.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire commander and funder of the mission, is a space geek.
He believes in humanity’s journey away from our home planet. And the experiments and proof of technology on this flight are part of that.
Isaacman has paid SpaceX for three Polaris missions. He hopes the third will be on Starship, the mega-rocket that Elon Musk hopes will take people to Mars.
He said recently that uncrewed flights should happen in two years.
If they land successfully, astronauts will be on board two years after that and a self-sustaining city will exist on Mars in 20 years.
It sounds far-fetched.
But daring missions like Polaris could make it more likely.
“Crew safety is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual, as it will be the furthest humans have travelled from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spacewalk!,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive, wrote about the mission last month on his social media site X.
There have been roughly 270 spacewalks on the International Space Station (ISS) since its creation in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
The SpaceX mission, called Polaris Dawn, will last about five days in an oval-shaped orbit that passes as close to Earth as 190km (118 miles) and as far as 1,400km (870 miles), the furthest any humans will have travelled since the end of the United States’s Apollo moon programme in 1972.
Now the spacecraft has launched, it will begin a “two-day pre-breathe process” to prepare the crew for their upcoming spacewalk on Thursday.