SpaceX Polaris Dawn's four-member crew is all set to attempt first-ever private, or commercial, spacewalk around 2:30 pm (Indian Standard Time) on Thursday, September 12. The mission is dubbed the riskiest mission yet for Elon Musk's SpaceX.
This is this first time that a private crew will conduct a spacewalk in space. Only government astronauts with several years of training have done spacewalks in the past.
If all goes well, the spacewalk by the private astronauts on Thursday will scrip history, testing a new line of spacesuits.
The spacewalk will be conducted by Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, two members of the four-person Polaris Dawn mission, Space.com reported. It will last around two hours, SpaceX and Polaris Dawn representatives reportedly said.
The spacewalk is slated to begin around 2:30 pm pm IST at 700 km (435 miles) in altitude. One can watch it LIVE directly via the company, SpaceX. The coverage will begin around 2:20 pm IST. WATCH here ⬇️
As part of the spacewalk, two astronauts will venture outside Crew Dragon, while the other two remain inside. Isaacman and Gillis do so sequentially, not simultaneously, and each will remain outside for 15 to 20 minutes, Isaacman had said during a prelaunch press briefing on August 26.
"Dragon and the Polaris Dawn crew have completed six orbits of Earth at ~1,400 km. Over the next five hours, Dragon will perform four burns to lower itself to an orbit of ~190 x 742 km in preparation for Thursday’s spacewalk," SpaceX said in a post on X on Wednesday.
Polaris Dawn launched at 2:53 pm (IST) on September 10 in Florida with four private crew members - Jared Isaacman, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon. SpaceX's Falcon 9 launched the Polaris Dawn, Dragon’s 14th human spaceflight mission.
The main goal of the spacewalk is to test the new SpaceX suits.
At approximately 700 km above Earth, the SpaceX Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suit, upgraded from the current intravehicular (IVA) suit, will support the Polaris Dawn crew in the vacuum of space during the first-ever commercial astronaut spacewalk.
Polaris program's website explains that building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require millions of spacesuits. "The development of this suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary," it added.
Meanwhile, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said their researchers will soon benefit from a suite of experiments flying aboard a new fully-commercial human spaceflight mission, "strengthening future agency science as we venture to the Moon, Mars and beyond".
The research will help NASA scientists better understand how exposure to space conditions affects the human body.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft throughout Wednesday circled Earth at least six times in an oval-shaped orbit as shallow on one end as 190 km. Polaris Dawn and Dragon reached 1,400 km above Earth – the farthest humans have travelled since the last US Apollo mission (1972) over 50 years ago.
With this, Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis and Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Anna Menon "became the first two women to have travelled this far in space!"
Elon Musk also posted, “Dragon astronauts are now further from Earth than any humans in over half a century!!”
Meanwhile, Mission Commander Jared Isaacman passed the torch to the NASA Artemis crew, saying "he’s looking forward to their upcoming flight," an X account of Polaris posted.
Polaris Dawn is also the first mission to test Starlink laser-based communications, using the “Plug and Plaser” inside Dragon’s trunk to communicate with Starlink satellites throughout the mission.
According to the company, the Polaris Dawn crew -- Jared, Kidd, Sarah, and Anna -- called their families on Earth. The calls were "conducted over Starlink connections and preparing a special message for fans later in the mission before settling in for a good night’s sleep ahead of tomorrow’s world-first commercial spacewalk".
https://x.com/PolarisProgram/status/1833987094219309426
Crew Dragon, the only US vehicle capable of reliably putting humans in orbit and returning them to Earth, since 2021 has flown more than a dozen astronaut missions, mainly for NASA. Boeing's Starliner capsule was also developed under that NASA program, but it is farther behind.
