If all goes according to plan, next Monday a four-person crew will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a SpaceX rocket to make history.
The mission, funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, will last five days and has several scientific goals, but the most important and undoubtedly riskiest is the first commercial spacewalk.
“Whatever risk there is in it, it’s worth doing,” Isaacman said during a news conference Monday.
This is the first flight test of SpaceX’s sleek new spacesuit, modeled after its intravehicular spacesuit.
But this spacewalk will be much different than the ones we’re most familiar with. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule doesn’t have an airlock, so the entire spacecraft will be depressurized, and all four crew members will test out new spacesuits.
The crew includes Isaacman, CEO of Shift4, a Pennsylvania-based payment processing company; Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former Air Force colonel; Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer and astronaut trainer; and Anna Menon, another SpaceX engineer who also serves in mission control.
Launch is scheduled for no earlier than August 26 at 3:30 a.m. Eastern.
Isaacman and Gillis will conduct a spacewalk at an altitude of 700 kilometers above Earth three days after the launch of the mission.
“EVA is a risky adventure. But again, we’ve done all this work to really prepare for it,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, who was NASA’s chief of human spaceflight until 2020. He’s now an engineer at SpaceX.
Preparations for the mission lasted two and a half years.
“In some ways we extended the NASA legacy, but I think we also expanded it a little bit more,” he said.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has the ultimate goal of colonizing Mars, so spacesuits are a necessary step.
“It hasn’t escaped our notice that it could be 10 iterations from now and many evolutions of the suit, but one day someone could wear a version that could walk on Mars,” Isaacman said. “And [it’s] It’s a great honor to have this opportunity and test it on this flight.”
Going boldly
Emmanuel Urquieta, vice chairman of the department of aerospace medicine at the University of Central Florida, said this historic spacewalk has a long history.
“I think the philosophy of these missions — Polaris Dawn and the Polaris program in general — is to follow the same path as the Gemini programs at NASA,” he told CBC News. “We’ve been developing a real space program, looking at one possibility at a time, yes, first showing that you can do it.”
The first spacewalk in history took place on March 18, 1965, with Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. The United States did the same on June 3, 1965, with astronaut Ed White.
SEE | Edward White’s First Spacewalk:
As with the upcoming SpaceX spacewalk, there was no airlock, so the Gemini spacecraft had to be depressurized.
But a spacewalk is not everything.
There will also be several other science goals, including orbiting at a much higher altitude 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 space radiation on the human body, because their orbit will take them partially out of the Van Allen Belt, a region that protects us from this harmful radiation.
They will also study other aspects of the impact of spaceflight on the human body, as well as a new form of laser communication using Starlink satellites.
Crew members say they are looking forward to their mission.
“I think it will definitely affect 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 a news conference Monday.
“I’ve spent years trying to get into the shoes of an astronaut in space, and I’m really looking forward to learning first-hand what it’s really like.”
As for Isaacman, this will be his second flight. In 2021, he flew on the first all-civilian mission, Inspiration4, aboard a SpaceX capsule.
“Being in space [there was] unexpected moment when the moon came up as I was looking at Earth. I didn’t expect to see that and I thought to myself, ‘Man, we just have to keep this going,'” Isaacman said of space exploration.
“You know, I wasn’t alive when people walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my children to see people walking on the moon and Mars and going out and exploring our solar system.”
