One of the most ambitious space Historic tourist missions have been launched, with commercial crews achieving several milestones during their five days in space, including the first privately funded human spacewalk.
The mission, called Polaris Dawn, took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today, Tuesday, September 10, at 5:23 a.m. ET. The crew of four, traveling inside a SpaceX The Crew Dragon capsule atop one of the California company’s Falcon 9 rockets included Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded the mission, SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, and pilot Scott Poteet.
The mission’s pioneering spacewalk was a “gimmick” in some respects, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But if you look at it as developing a capability, independent of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)to do spacewalks, that’s potentially important,” he said.
Originally scheduled to launch in late August, Polaris Dawn was postponed first due to technical and weather issues, and then due to a botched landing of another Falcon 9 rocket, which led to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) temporarily grounding the Falcon 9 fleet. The crew remained quarantined throughout that time but kept busy with additional training.
After launch, the Crew Dragon spacecraft will be placed into orbit, taking it as high as 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) above Earth’s surface, making it the farthest astronauts have traveled from Earth since the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972 and the highest altitude a woman has ever reached. “This is the farthest human beings have traveled since the last time humans walked on the moon,” Isaacman said in a Pre-launch summary at Kennedy Space Center on August 19.
Isaacman, CEO of US payments company Shift4, flew into space earlier in September 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission. That mission, also carried out on a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle, cost about up to 200 million dollarsshows SpaceX’s ability to allow the super-rich to afford the ultimate thrill, a trip into orbit as space tourists. (The cost of the Polaris Dawn mission has not yet been disclosed.)
Space tourism missions have taken place many times before, started in 2001 when American businessman Dennis Tito became the first paying passenger on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft International Space Station (ISS)Over the past few years, dozens of paying customers of companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have also made brief “hops” into suborbital space lasting a few minutes.
But Crew Dragon, funded in part by nearly 5 billion dollars NASA’s new vehicle to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS after the space shuttle was retired in 2011 offers a whole new perspective on such missions. The vehicle, which is as spacious as a large car and can accommodate up to seven passengers, can make private flights to Earth orbit, not just to the ISS, and allows for new types of missions.
