Four astronauts have blasted out of the atmosphere as part of a privately funded five-day mission that aims to carry out the first commercial spacewalk.
Jared Isaacman, the American billionaire founder of the electronic payment company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris Dawn mission and acting as commander of the crew.
It is the second trip Isaacman has charted. In 2021, he flew on the Inspiration4” mission, the first orbital spaceflight by an all-civilian crew, which included a cancer survivor as well as a data engineer who won his seat in a raffle draw.
Isaacman, who has thousands of hours in various aircraft, is joined this time by a retired military fighter pilot and two employees of SpaceX, the Elon Musk-owned company that is operating the mission.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday morning after several delays. A previous attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before liftoff after a small helium leak on the launchpad. It was later pushed back further when the same make of rocket was temporarily grounded by US regulators for checks.
The trip will last about five days and take an oval-shaped orbit that travels as far as 870 miles (1,400km) from Earth’s surface.
“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,” Musk wrote about the mission last month on his social media site, X.
Polaris Dawn will travel to an altitude of 1,400 km, attempt the first commercial spacewalk from Dragon, test Starlink-laser based communications, and conduct a wide range of research in microgravity before returning to Earth and splashing down off the coast of Florida pic.twitter.com/X4kGksg3Rd
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 10, 2024
Only well-funded government agencies have so far managed to carry out spacewalks, known as EVAs (extravehicular activities), and they are a notoriously difficult feat. Most have been done from the International Space Station (ISS) and the Chinese Tiangong space station.
Polaris Dawn’s spacewalk is planned for the mission’s third day at an altitude of 435 miles and will last about 20 minutes. As SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft has no airlock, all four astronauts will wear SpaceX-designed spacesuits while the entire cabin is depressurised. Isaacman, 41, and the SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis, 30, will exit the spacecraft tethered by an oxygen line.
SpaceX’s crewed missions are part of Musk’s plan to take astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars, which it has plans to “colonise”. The company is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, called Starship, and has carried out four test flights of the 120-metre-tall system.
Over the next five days, Polaris Dawn’s crew will in effect act as test subjects for future deep space travel by travelling through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt and then analysing the effects of space radiation on their bodies.
Private companies are gradually taking the lead in spaceflight as governments, and in particular the US government, seek to spend tax revenue elsewhere. Nasa has contracted SpaceX to land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moon this decade.
SpaceX’s rivals include Boeing, although its spacecraft, Starliner, has recently faced issues and had to leave two Nasa astronauts stuck on the ISS. Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore embarked on what should have been a one-week mission in June but thruster failures and helium leaks on Starliner meant it returned crewless. Williams and Wilmore will remain on the space station until February.