by SpaceX is preparing to launch its next private mission by the end of the month, which will be the astronauts’ first attempt to step out into space.
The Polaris Dawn mission – the first of three flights billionaire and Shift4 founder Jared Isaacman bought from SpaceX in 2022 for its human spaceflight effort called the Polaris Program – is scheduled to launch from Florida early on August 26.
“We don’t have the freedom any time of the day to send but I think it will work out for him [be] pretty close to dawn, which is very appropriate given the mission,” Isaacman told CNBC’s Investing in Space during an interview last month.
Isaacman will lead the mission, as he did when he led the historic Inspiration4 flight in 2021. He is once again leading a crew of four, with longtime colleague Scott Poteet working with him as pilot and Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, a pair of SpaceX employees. , serving as the flight medical officer and mission specialist, respectively.
The multi-day trip is not headed for a destination, but instead will be a free-flight mission tracking orbits that the team hopes will take them far from Earth.
“We’re going to a very high altitude that people haven’t gone to in over 50 years,” Isaacman said.
But the heart of Polaris Dawn is the proposed space path.
Extra-vehicular activities, or EVAs, have been a regular part of NASA astronaut missions for many years, such as when the agency requires maintenance performed outside the International Space Station. But no private enterprise has attempted EVA before.
Isaacman said he understands that going on a spacewalk means he and his crew will be “surrounded by death”, a moment they have been training extensively for.
“The only thing that comes close to that is the vacuum chamber, and that’s where you feel pretty close to what it’s like to be in vacuum conditions or space. … That definitely gives you the feeling of the pressure changes and the temperature changes, as well as the psychological stresses of being in a very intense environment,” Isaacman said.
Five day mission plan
Isaacman also detailed the daily schedule for Polaris Dawn, which will be in space for up to five days.
The first day involves looking for a time when there is minimal risk from micrometeor orbital debris, which will determine exactly when Polaris Dawn will be launched. After reaching a 190-kilometer-by-1,200-kilometer orbit, Isaacman said the team will conduct extensive checks on SpaceX’s Dragon Resilience capsule.
“It’s really important to know that there are no defects on the vehicle before it goes up to 1,400 kilometers” high, Isaacman said.
The spacecraft will also make early passes through the high-radiation zone known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.
“Ideally you want to take that at the lowest altitude you can because even down at 200 kilometers, the radiation level is much higher … Our two or three passes will be at high altitude through the South Atlantic Almost the entire anomaly of the radiation burden on the mission and like the equivalent of three months on the International Space Station,” said Isaacman.
The second day will focus on some of the science and research that Polaris Dawn plans to carry out – which will bring about 40 experiments in total. The team will also prepare for the spacewalk, testing the EVA suits.
“So we can make sure that … there’s nothing unexpected in microgravity compared to what we’ve been able to test on Earth,” Isaacman said.
The third day is the big one: The EVA.
The spaceway
So which team will do the spacewalk?
“Let’s say the four of us are doing it — there’s no airlock and it’s being vacuumed” inside the spacecraft, Isaacman said.
Two of the crew will travel outside of Dragon: Isaacman and Gillis, while Poteet and Menon will stay inside for support.
The EVA is expected to last two hours from start to finish. Isaacman pointed out that the spacewalk is really a “test and development process.”
“We want to learn as much as we can about the suit and the operation as possible, but we only have so much oxygen and nitrogen to work with,” Isaacman said.
Polaris Dawn plans to live stream the spacewalk, and the mission commander emphasized that there will be “a lot of cameras” scattered inside and outside the capsule.
Brand new space suit
The critical piece of equipment planned to make the EVA possible is SpaceX’s spacesuit.
The company has spent the past few years building a minimalist, black-and-white IVA suit — which stands for Intravenous Activity, and is worn by astronauts in an emergency — and using it to create its EVA suit. Isaacman said EVA suits are the result of hundreds of hours of testing different materials over the years.
“So our main goal is to learn as much as we can about the suit,” Isaacman said.
“Everything is about building the next generation. We are continuing to iterate on this suit design so that SpaceX can someday have hundreds or thousands of them working on the moon, Mars. [low Earth orbit]what do you have Building a new EVA suit is not an easy task,” he said.
Polaris Dawn aims to push the boundaries of private spaceflight and, like his first trip to orbit, Isaacman hopes the mission will inspire.
“It’s the inspiration side of … anything that’s different than what we’ve seen in the last 20 or 30 years is what gets people excited, thinking: ‘Well if this is what I see today, I wonder what will happen tomorrow or a year later.”
Read Isaacman’s Q&A with CNBC’s Investing in the Space newsletter here.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
