The Dragon capsule sits atop a Falcon 9 rocket on Kennedy's Launch Pad 39A. Credit: Polaris Program/John Kraus (Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License)
UPDATE 08/28/24: After postponing the initial launch from Tuesday to Wednesday of this week to check for a helium leak in the launch system, SpaceX has again delayed the launch of Polaris Dawn, citing poor weather forecasts off the coast of Florida on the day of the mission's splashdown. According to a post on X, the mission team will continue to monitor the weather to find a launch time that guarantees good conditions for both takeoff and splashdown.
A billionaire entrepreneur and aviator, a Thunderbird pilot, a former NASA biomedical flight controller and a seasoned astronaut training program leader prepare to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center Tuesday morning. Over five days, Polaris Dawn’s pioneering crew will conduct 36 experiments, perform the first commercial spacewalk, fly higher than any human in five decades and conduct health research from within Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts.
The crew will reach 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), higher than any human mission to Earth orbit in history, aboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. Resilience capsule. It is the first of two private missions that make up the Polaris Program, announced in February 2022 by billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX “to rapidly advance the capabilities of human spaceflight.”
Originally scheduled for November 2022, SpaceX’s EVA suit development delayed the mission by nearly a year. The partial failure of a Falcon 9 launch last month added further complications. Liftoff is now scheduled from Pad 39A on Tuesday at one of three possible times: 3:38 a.m., 5:23 a.m. or 7:09 a.m. EDT.
Meet the crew
Commander Jared “Rook” Isaacman founded the payments company Shift4 as a teenager. An accomplished aviator, he circumnavigated the globe in 61 hours in 2009. And in 2021, Isaacman commanded Inspiration4, the first all-civilian spaceflight, whose crew included the first astronaut with prosthetics and raised $250 million for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.
Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired Air Force fighter pilot and combat veteran, graduated from the Air Force Weapons School and, as a Thunderbird, flew with Britain’s famed Red Arrows. Poteet previously served as mission director for Inspiration4.
Joining Isaacman and Poteet are two mission specialists: SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. Menon, a former biomedical flight controller on the International Space Station (ISS) before joining SpaceX as a mission director, became hooked on space in the fourth grade. Her teacher was Alison Smith Balch, daughter of astronaut Mike Smith, who died in 1986. Challenger disaster. She is also the mission's medical officer.
Gillis also found inspiration in a mentor at school: astronaut Joe Tanner, who encouraged the classical violinist to study aerospace engineering. Gillis interned at SpaceX and later, as a space operations engineer, helped train astronauts for flight aboard the Dragon capsule, including the crew of Inspiration4.
Mission of Firsts
Gillis and Isaacman’s EVA, planned at an altitude of 700 km, will break several world records. It will be three times higher than the ISS and the highest EVA ever conducted in Earth orbit, beating the altitude record of 1,370 km set by Gemini 11 astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad and Richard “Dick” Gordon in September 1966.
Gillis, who will be 30 years, 242 days old on the planned date of the EVA, will also become the youngest human to perform a spacewalk, eclipsing the first Soviet cosmonaut to perform a spacewalk, Alexei Leonov, who was 30 years, 292 days old when he floated out of the Voskhod-2 capsule in March 1965.
Together with Menon, Gillis will also fly to the highest altitude ever achieved by a woman, more than doubling the 576 kilometers achieved by astronauts Kathy Thornton, Nancy Currie and Megan McArthur on three Hubble Space Telescope repair flights between 1993 and 2009.
Humans in space
Polaris Dawn’s orbit will pass through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly. There, the lower of Earth’s two Van Allen Belts — a zone of energetic charged particles stretching from 1,000 to 58,000 kilometers above the planet — is closest to Earth. With high concentrations of energetic electrons and protons, the Van Allen Belts are harmful to humans if exposed to them for extended periods. The expected radiation dose to the crew for just five days in this environment is equivalent to three months aboard the ISS.
Related: The anomaly that killed a spacecraft in the South Atlantic
The crew will use radiation monitors and plates to record the doses received. They will investigate the mysterious flashes of light that astronauts report when their eyes are closed, thought to be caused by cosmic radiation, and explore the effects of radiation on plant growth.
Another goal is to further research into the effects of spaceflight on the human body. The crew will investigate changes in eye shape and vision experienced by some astronauts, possibly due to fluid shifts toward the head in microgravity, using 3-D ultrasound and “smart” contact lenses with tiny sensors. They will collect biological samples and test tools to prevent bone and muscle loss, as well as a new anti-nausea drug. And they will try to understand the brain’s role in learning and memorizing the space environment for repeated trips. Crew members will also evaluate how future deep-space travelers might diagnose and treat themselves with commercially available equipment and test the feasibility of CPR in space.
Testing the limits
On two previous flights in 2020 and 2021, Resilience It logged 170 days in space, traveled 71 million miles (115 million kilometers) and logged 2,734 orbits. Isaacman, Poteet, Menon and Gillis will fly Resilience another 2.1 million miles (3.4 million kilometers) and 80 more orbits.
Following launch, Polaris Dawn's initial orbit will take it to 750 miles (1,200 km) at its highest point (apogee) and 120 miles (200 km) at its lowest point (perigee). After validation ResilienceTo maintain the health of the spacecraft, the Draco thrusters will raise the apogee to 1,400 kilometers (870 miles), a new world record. Polaris Dawn will maintain this apogee for 10 hours on the first day, then reduce it to 700 kilometers (435 miles) until the end of the mission.
But the real drama of the flight is undoubtedly the spacewalk on the third day. Resilience As there is no airlock, the entire capsule will be depressurised to a vacuum and all crew members will be wearing spacesuits. In preparation, cabin pressure and oxygen levels will be gradually adjusted over 45 hours before the spacewalk. This will ensure that astronauts do not suffer from decompression sickness (Down syndrome) when they take off their spacesuits afterwards, as the suits offer much lower pressure than normal cabin pressure.
Based on the suit already used by Dragon crews for takeoff and landing, the Polaris Dawn suit adds a 3D-printed helmet with a single-layer visor and a heads-up display for suit metrics. It is flame-retardant thanks to its stretch fabric, redundant pressure seals and valves, novel rotor seals, and boots made from the same heat-retardant material used on Falcon 9.
To begin the spacewalk, Isaacman will climb a ladder (nicknamed Skywalker) mounted on ResilienceNASA's docking port and motorized hatch will open, exposing the entire crew to the vacuum. This will break a record for the largest number of humans simultaneously exposed to space, dating back to May 1992, when Pierre Thuot, Rick Hieb and Tom Akers performed the first (and only) three-man EVA aboard the space shuttle. EndeavorNASA STS-49 mission.
Connected via an umbilical cord to the capsule’s life support services, Isaacman and Gillis will emerge separately for 15 to 20 minutes each, maintaining contact with the capsule through mobility aids attached to the Skywalker. They will demonstrate the suit’s thermal and life support performance and perform a series of test exercises that Isaacman compared in a tweet to a dance.
Being the highest EVA in Earth orbit, the risks of micrometeoroid impacts are correspondingly higher. Resilience It will be positioned so as to protect the hatch from possible impacts and thus protect the spacewalkers.
The spacewalk is expected to last two hours, including time for cabin ventilation, pressurization and contingencies. Inside the spacecraft, Poteet and Menon will remain seated, handling the umbilicals and monitoring data.
Much more to achieve
The rest of the Polaris Dawn mission is filled with science and public outreach. The crew is carrying a silver bar that will be used in future Olympic medals and four white ceramic watches donated by Swiss luxury watchmaker IWC Schaffhausen to be auctioned off to benefit St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.
Doritos, the mission’s charitable partner, has provided boxes of Cool Ranch Zero Gravity potato chips that glow in the dark and have an oil-based coating to keep them from crumbling in space. “We appreciate having a solid snack to eat in space,” Isaacman tweeted earlier this month.
On day four, the crew will use Starlink to connect with doctors on the ground to conduct a telemedicine test. Gillis also said during an interview that the crew has “a special message that we will share with the world” via Starlink.
After five days, Resilience will land off the coast of Florida.
The Polaris Program gained media attention in late 2022 when NASA and SpaceX signed an unfunded Space Act Agreement to explore a Dragon mission to boost Hubble to a higher orbit. However, in June it became known that NASA is no longer seeking a boost to the telescope with the help of Dragon.
What future Polaris missions will look like remains to be seen, but first, this one aims to make history.
This story was originally published on August 26, 2024. It will be updated as launch details become available.
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