SpaceX blasts off billionaire and three other private astronauts for ‘risky’ first-ever spacewalk | Science & Tech News

John Adams


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.

SpaceX
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Pic: SpaceX

It is the riskiest private space mission so far – only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have done spacewalks in the past.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by EyePress News/Shutterstock (14664570a).The Polaris Dawn crew at the Kennedy Space Center, from left to right: Anna Menon as mission specialists, retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Scott Kidd Poteet as its pilot, Jared Isaacman, CEO of Shift4, as commander, and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis completed a full rehearsal of launch day activities ahead of liftoff on Tuesday Aug 27, 2024. Polaris Dawn, a private space mission that aims to complete the first-ever civilian spacewalk, is expected to launch this week. On X, SpaceX said it's targeting Tuesday August 27 at 3:38AM ET for liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket that will carry the Polaris Dawn crew to orbit. Led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, Polaris Dawn plans to send its crew of four private citizens as far as 870 miles from Earth - farther than any human has traveled since the Apollo program. The spacewalk, in which two of the crew members will step outside the SpaceX Dragon capsule, will take place at an altitude of 435 miles above Earth. (SpaceX handout via EYEPRESS).The Polaris Dawn Crew Prep for First Commercial Spacewalk at the Kennedy Space Center, Orlando, Florida - 26 Aug 2024
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The Polaris Dawn crew at the Kennedy Space Center. File pic: EyePress News/Shutterstock

SpaceX
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Pic: SpaceX

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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SpaceX
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The crew during take-off. Pic: SpaceX

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.

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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.



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