SpaceX Polaris program launches on historic mission with private crew

SpaceX early on Tuesday launched an all-private astronaut crew to orbit that intends to make history by completing the first spacewalk conducted by nongovernment astronauts, as well as traveling farther than any human spaceflight mission since the Apollo moon landings. After several delays due to weather last week, the Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 5:23 a.m., hoisting a Dragon spacecraft carrying Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur who is leading the mission; Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and fighter jet pilot; and two SpaceX employees: Sarah Gillis, who oversees the company’s astronaut training program, and Anna Menon, who serves as a mission director and an astronaut communicator from mission control. Isaacman and Gillis would take turns venturing outside the hatch for about 15 minutes each, while tethered to the spacecraft by umbilicals, and using hand and foot rails that SpaceX built for the mission. Advertisement Isaacman said he was inspired by NASA astronaut Ed White, who performed the first American spacewalk during the Gemini program in 1965 and floated away from his spacecraft. White’s tethered free-floating “looks very cool, and it was inspirational,” Isaacman said before the flight. Share this article Share The spacewalk is intended to test SpaceX’s new spacesuit, which is designed to protect the astronauts from the extreme thermal environment in space, as well as against radiation. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule does not have an airlock, meaning all four crew members would need to put on spacesuits as they open the hatch. Under what he calls the Polaris program, Isaacman intends to continue to push boundaries over three additional flights that would culminate in the first crewed launch of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket. “We leverage off of what we learned from NASA in some ways, and then we push it a little bit further in other areas,” Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and reliability, said during a briefing last month. “Then we share with each other what we know, what we don’t know, and we really test and evaluate and make sure we’re going forward and doing things the right way.” Advertisement Gerstenmaier spent much of his career at NASA and led the agency’s human spaceflight division before leaving to take a job at SpaceX, which he said is able to move faster than the government. “We’re getting a chance to do that again, where we’re really starting to push frontiers with the private sector and learning new things that we would not be able to learn by staying in the risk-free environment of here on Earth.” – This Summarize was created by Neural News AI (V1). Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/09/10/spacex-polaris-spacewalk-private-spaceflight/