Polaris Dawn commander Jared Isaacman during spacesuit testing.
John Kraus / Polaris Program
SpaceX is preparing to launch its next private mission later this month, marking the first attempt to send astronauts into space.
Polaris Dawn mission — the first of three flights by the billionaire and Convert4 Founder Jared Isaacman purchased from SpaceX in 2022 for the human spaceflight effort known as the Polaris Program — scheduled to launch from Florida early on August 26.
“We don’t have the freedom of any time of day to launch but I think it will work. [be] pretty close to dawn, which is perfect for this mission,” Isaacman said. CNBC Space Investing in an interview last month.
Isaacman will command the mission, as he did when he led historic Inspiration4 flight 2021. He once again commanded the four-person crew, with longtime colleague Scott Poteet joining as pilot and SpaceX employees Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis serving as the flight’s medical officer and mission specialist, respectively.
The multi-day trip is not headed to a specific location, but instead will be a free-flying mission that tracks a trajectory the crew hopes will take it away from Earth.
“We’re going to go to a very high altitude that humans haven’t been to in over 50 years,” Isaacman said.
Polaris Dawn crew, from left to right: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis.
SpaceX
But the focus of Polaris Dawn is the planned spacewalk.
Extravehicular activities, or EVAs, have been a regular part of NASA astronaut missions for years, such as when the agency needs to perform maintenance outside the International Space Station. But no private company has ever attempted an EVA before.
Isaacman said he understood that the spacewalk meant he and his crew would be “surrounded by death,” a moment they had has been extensively trained.
“The only thing that comes close to that is a vacuum chamber, and that’s where you feel almost like you’re in a vacuum or space,” Isaacman said. “… That definitely gives you a real sense of the pressure and temperature changes, as well as just the psychological stresses of being in a very extreme environment.”
Five Day Mission Plan
The Polaris Dawn mission crew, from left to right: Medical Officer Anna Menon, Pilot Scott Poteet, Commander Jared Isaacman and Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis.
The Polaris Program / John Kraus
Isaacman also detailed the daily schedule for Polaris Dawn, which will stay in space for up to five days.
The first day is all about finding the moment of minimal risk from micrometeorite orbital debris, which will determine exactly when Polaris Dawn will launch. Once it reaches its 190-kilometer by 1,200-kilometer orbit, Isaacman said the crew will do a thorough check of SpaceX’s Dragon Resilience capsule.
“It’s really important to know that there’s nothing wrong with the vehicle before we get to 1,400 kilometers,” Isaacman said.
The spacecraft will also make early flights through a high-radiation region known as South Atlantic Anomaly.
“Ideally you want to do it at the lowest altitude possible because even at 200 kilometers, the radiation levels there are significantly higher… Two or three High Altitude flybys over our South Atlantic Anomaly would account for almost the entire radiation exposure of the mission and would be equivalent to three months on the International Space Station,” Isaacman said.
Day two will focus on some of the science and research Polaris Dawn plans to conduct — there will be about 40 experiments in total. The crew will also prepare for a spacewalk, testing their EVA suits.
“So we can be sure that … there are no surprises in microgravity compared to what we can test on Earth,” Isaacman said.
The third day is the most important day: EVA.
Space walk
So who on the crew will be doing the spacewalk?
“We assume that all four of us are doing that — there’s no airlock and the air is being vented down to create a vacuum” inside the spacecraft, Isaacman said.
Two crew members will move outside the Dragon: Isaacman and Gillis, while Poteet and Menon stay inside to provide support.
The EVA is expected to last two hours from start to finish. Isaacman stressed that the spacewalk is “really a testing and development process.”
“We want to learn as much as we can about this suit and how it works, but we only have a certain amount of oxygen and nitrogen to work with,” Isaacman said.
Polaris Dawn plans to livestream the spacewalk, and mission commanders stressed that there will be “a lot of cameras” positioned inside and outside the capsule.
Brand new astronaut suit
SpaceX’s extravehicular activity (EVA) suit during testing on June 24, 2024.
John Kraus / Polaris Program
The most important piece of equipment that makes EVA possible is SpaceX’s spacesuit.
The company has spent the past few years taking its minimalist-looking black-and-white IVA suit—which works in vehicles, and is worn by astronauts in case of emergency—and using it to create its EVA suit. Isaacman says the EVA suit is 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 geared toward building the next generation. We continue to iterate on this suit design so that SpaceX can have hundreds or thousands of people working on the moon, Mars, [low Earth orbit]You know, building a new EVA suit is no easy task,” he added.
Polaris Dawn medical specialist Anna Menon during spacesuit testing.
John Kraus / Polaris Program
Polaris Dawn aims to push the boundaries of private spaceflight, and like the first trip into orbit, Isaacman hopes this mission will inspire.
“That’s where the inspiration comes from… anything that’s different from what we’ve seen in the last 20 or 30 years gets people excited, thinking, ‘Wow, if this is what I see today, I wonder what tomorrow or a year from now will be like.’”
Read Isaacman’s Q&A with CNBC’s Investing in Space newsletter here.
