The Polaris Dawn crew on Thursday shared pictures from space on social media platform X with the help of Starlink satellite internet, showing the Earth from outer space.
What Happened: “Sent to you from space over a beam of Starlink laser light,” the team wrote about the two pictures. While one picture shows the four-member all-civilian crew, the other shows the Earth as seen from outer space.
Starlink is the satellite internet segment of Elon Musk’s SpaceX aimed at removing cellular dead zones with the help of a satellite constellation in low-Earth orbit.
Polaris Dawn is the first of up to three human spaceflight missions planned under the Polaris program founded by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched the mission to space from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at around 5:23 a.m. ET on Tuesday. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and the all-civilian Polaris Crew composed of four including its mission commander Isaacman, Kidd Poteet, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon will spend up to five days in orbit before returning to Earth.
Other Landmarks On Mission: On day two of the mission, the mission touched its maximum target altitude of 870 miles, marking the farthest humans have ventured from Earth in over 50 years since the end of the Apollo program. The International Space Station (ISS), in comparison, travels to a maximum altitude of only about 285 miles.
During a spacewalk earlier on Thursday, crew members Isaacman and Gillis separately exited SpaceX‘s Dragon spacecraft into the vacuum of space at an altitude of about 738 km.
Isaacman exited the spacecraft first after the Dragon's cabin was depressurized and the hatch opened, followed by Gillis. Gillis' return to the capsule and subsequent closing of the hatch marked the end of the spacewalk.
Both Isaacman and Gillis spent about 12 minutes each outside of the spacecraft, testing the SpaceX-designed EVA spacesuits.
While space agency NASA routinely conducts extravehicular activities with government astronauts, no commercial player or civilians have attempted it before, making this a landmark achievement for SpaceX and commercial spaceflight companies.
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Photo courtesy: Polaris Dawn
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