WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Crew Dragon is in orbit on a long-awaited private astronaut mission that will attempt the first commercial spacewalk and go higher than any crewed mission in more than 50 years.
Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 5:23 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Sept. 10 on the Polaris Dawn mission. Controllers took advantage of the second of three launch opportunities available in the early morning hours after bad weather forced them to cancel an initial launch attempt nearly two hours earlier.
Crew Dragon separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage about 12 minutes after liftoff. The mission was targeting an initial orbit of about 120 by 750 miles (190 by 1,200 kilometers), though SpaceX did not immediately release details about the orbit actually achieved at launch.
After about eight orbits, Dragon will raise its apogee to 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) for the next six orbits. That altitude will be the highest for a crewed mission since the Apollo 17 mission to the Moon in December 1972. It will then lower its apogee to 700 kilometers (430 miles).
The mission’s highlight will be flight day three, Sept. 12. The four-person crew, wearing new SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) suits, will depressurize Crew Dragon’s cabin. Two of the four, commander Jared Isaacman and mission specialist Sarah Gillis, will exit individually through the hatch on Dragon’s nose for about 15 to 20 minutes each, performing the first spacewalks on a nongovernmental mission.
“EVA probably makes up the bulk of Polaris Dawn development,” Isaacman said in A press conference on August 19 about the missionand one of the most risky. “You are throwing away all the safety of your vehicle. Your suit becomes your spaceship.”
Following the spacewalk, the Polaris Dawn crew, which includes pilot Kidd Poteet and mission specialist Anna Menon, will test inter-satellite laser links between Crew Dragon and SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, as well as conduct about 40 experiments involving human health and related topics. The mission will end on flight day six, or Sept. 15, with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.
Isaacman, who previously commanded and funded the Inspiration4 private astronaut mission that launched on another Crew Dragon almost exactly three years ago, announced the Polaris program of private astronaut missions in February 2022At the time, they hoped to fly Polaris Dawn in late 2022.
That timeline was significantly delayed, however, largely due to work on the EVA suits. “When we first started, we came in every day to train, and pretty much every day we’d come in and there was a different suit,” Gillis recalled at the press conference, as engineers adjusted various components of the suit.
Isaacman said at the briefing that the original timeline was too ambitious. “If it was the initial nine-month timeline, I think everyone would probably be wondering how we were able to work so quickly,” he said, but added that this provided motivation for the project. “I think it was right from the beginning to say we were going to try to accomplish this at the speed of light.”
Both the Polaris Dawn crew and SpaceX officials were confident they were finally ready to fly. “EVA is a risky venture, but we’ve made all the preparations,” Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president for build and flight reliability and former NASA associate administrator responsible for human spaceflight, said at the briefing. “I think it’s really a tribute to this team that they’re advancing the state of the art, and we’re going to do it as safely as possible.”
In the run-up to launch, Polaris Dawn suffered a delay of a different kind. The mission’s launch, scheduled for August 26, was delayed a day to allow more time for spacecraft preparations and another day to repair a helium leak on the ground side of a quick-disconnect umbilical cable. Then the weather intervened, with persistent forecasts of bad weather at the splashdown sites.
“Our launch criteria are heavily constrained by the weather conditions predicted for splashdown. Without a rendezvous point with the ISS and with limited life support consumables, we must be absolutely certain of the weather conditions for reentry prior to launch,” Isaacman said Aug. 27 when SpaceX first announced the weather delays. Those delays persisted for nearly two weeks before forecasts improved enough for a launch attempt.
The mission also had to lift off by the end of the week or face further delays — likely not before October — so SpaceX could prepare LC-39A for the Oct. 10 launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper on a Falcon Heavy. That mission has a three-week launch window.
Polaris Dawn is intended to be the first of three missions in the Polaris program that will culminate with the first crewed launch of SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft. The program has not offered a timeline for that mission or for a second Crew Dragon mission that Isaacman said will build on Polaris Dawn in unspecified ways.
Isaacman, founder and CEO of payment processing company Shift4 with An estimated net worth of $1.8 billiondeclined at the news conference to say how much it is spending on the Polaris Dawn mission.
