Polaris Dawn Finally Gets a Break

Polaris Dawn finally lifted off this morning after a long series of weather delays. The four private astronauts will spend five days in orbit with the goal of flying higher than any previous Earth-orbiting human spaceflight mission and conducting the first commercial spacewalk. They bring to 16 the number of human beings currently in orbit and three more are scheduled to launch tomorrow, which will set a new record.

The crew was ready to go on Monday, August 26, but the launch was delayed from Monday to Tuesday for additional pre-launch checkouts, from Tuesday to Wednesday because of a ground-side helium leak, and since Wednesday, August 28, until now because of weather constraints. Today was the lucky day although even this morning it was delayed from 3:38 am ET to 5:23 am ET due to weather.

Since they will not visit the International Space Station, there is no safe haven and they must return to Earth before their supplies run out. That meant not only did the weather have to be OK for launch, but they had to know it would be favorable five days later for splashdown off the Florida coast.

The four-person crew is commanded by tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who is paying for this mission as he did for his first spaceflight, Inspiration4, in 2021. The founder of the Shift4 payment processing system and an experienced private jet pilot, he purchased three more flights from SpaceX after Inspiration4: this one and another on Crew Dragon, and the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship to Earth orbit. The dates for the latter two missions haven’t been set. Starship is still in development.

Joining him on this flight are Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. Poteet is a former jet pilot who went to work for one of Isaacman’s companies, Draken International, after retiring from the Air Force. He was mission director for Inspiration4 and is the pilot of Polaris Dawn. Gillis and Menon are SpaceX engineers who worked with Isaacman on Inspiration4 and are mission specialists on Polaris Dawn. Gillis oversaw astronaut training for Inspiration4. Menon works in SpaceX mission control and was a biomedical flight controller at NASA before moving over to SpaceX. She’s the medical officer for Polaris Dawn.

Their goal is to reach the highest altitude for a human spaceflight mission in Earth orbit, 14,000 kilometers (870 miles), and to conduct the first commercial spacewalk — or Extravehicular Activity (EVA) — after lowering their altitude to 700 kilometers (435 miles).

To date, the highest Earth-orbital human spaceflight mission was 1,373 km (853 miles) on Gemini 11 in 1966. The only human spaceflight missions that have gone further were the Apollo missions to the Moon (Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17) between 1968 and 1972.

Isaacman and Gillis will make the EVAs sequentially over the course of two hours in SpaceX-designed spacesuits. They will not leave the spacecraft. Each of them in turn will stand up in a frame installed in the capsule’s hatch.

Crew Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, so like the earliest Soviet and American spacewalks in the 1960s, the entire capsule must be depressurized and Menon and Poteet also will be EVA suits.

The EVA is scheduled for day three of the five-day mission, which will be Thursday, September 12. SpaceX plans to livestream it.

With the Polaris Dawn crew now in orbit, there are 16 human beings in space: four on Polaris Dawn, nine on the International Space Station, and three on China’s Tiangong-3 space station. They’ll be joined by three more tomorrow who are launching on Soyuz MS-26 — Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut  Don Pettit. That will set a new record of 19 people in orbit at one time.

The most number of people in orbit at one time so far is 17, a record set in May 2023 with 11 on the ISS (Soyuz MS-23, Crew-6, Ax-2) and six on Tiangong-3 (Shenzhou 15 and 16).

The greatest number in *space* at one time is slightly higher because it includes people who launch on brief suborbital missions, but they are not in orbit.