SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Sunday said that the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission to be launched by the company will be “epic,” given that it would be the first time a private company is attempting a spacewalk.
What Happened: The Polaris program is a private human spaceflight program founded by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman. It will consist of up to three human spaceflight missions, the first of which is Polaris Dawn.
The Polaris Dawn mission is expected to launch no earlier than August 26 on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. 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. While Isaacman and Poteet work together at Shift4, Gillis and Menon are both SpaceX engineers.
The mission aims to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown and will also test Starlink laser-based communications in space.
The Historic Spacewalk: The key objective of the mission, however, is to conduct a spacewalk nearly 435 miles above the Earth — marking the first-ever commercial astronaut spacewalk — with the help of a SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity spacesuit.
While space agency NASA routinely conducts extravehicular activities, no private player has attempted it before, making this a landmark mission for SpaceX and commercial spaceflight companies.
“First SpaceX spacewalk mission launches in a week. This will be epic. Musk wrote about the upcoming mission,” Musk said on X. “This is big,” he wrote in another post.
“We are thankful for the opportunity,” Isaacman wrote to Musk.
Why It Matters: SpaceX had its first all-civilian spaceflight in 2021. The mission, called Inspiration4, then too was led by Isaacman.
SpaceX is currently leading the spaceflight segment, trumping even national agencies. In the first quarter of 2024, SpaceX had 31 launches, trumping China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) which had 9 launches, and Russia's Roscosmos which had 5.
For the whole year, SpaceX is now looking to complete 144 launches.
"SpaceX might exceed 90% of all Earth payload to orbit later this year," Musk said in May.
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Photo courtesy: NASA
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