Polaris Dawn Readies for First Commercial Spacewalk

Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn private astronaut crew arrived at Kennedy Space Center today a week before their scheduled launch. Isaacman and three crewmates will spend about five days aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon with the goals of setting a new altitude record for an Earth-orbiting human space flight and conducting the first non-governmental spacewalk. They also will conduct science experiments and raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

This is the second spaceflight for the billionaire tech entrepreneur who founded the Shift4 payment processing company. He bankrolled the three-day Inspiration4 mission in 2021, the first all-commercial crew mission. The next year he announced plans for three more flights on SpaceX spacecraft under the name “Polaris Program.” Two are on Crew Dragon. The third will be the first crewed mission of SpaceX’s Starship to Earth orbit.

This is the first of the three, Polaris Dawn, scheduled for launch on August 26 at 3:38 am ET from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, which SpaceX leases from NASA. The launch window extends to 7:00 am ET.

Isaacman, whose nickname is Rook, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon met with reporters today along with Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s Vice President of Build and Flight Reliability. Gerstenmaier joined SpaceX in 2020 after 42 years at NASA including almost 15 years as head of its human spaceflight program.

Gerstenmaier, Isaacman and the rest of the crew framed the mission as a step towards achieving Elon Musk’s vision of sending millions of people to live on Mars. To advance that goal, they will test new technologies including SpaceX’s new spacesuit for extravehicular activity (EVA), also known as a spacewalk.

The first spacewalks — by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and U.S. astronaut Ed White — took place in the mid-1960s and are common today. They all have been in spacesuits developed under government supervision. This is the first privately developed EVA suit. Gerstenmaier said SpaceX and Isaacman shared the cost, adding that SpaceX views it as an investment in the future. He didn’t say what the spacesuit cost and, when asked, Isaacman declined to share how much he is paying at all for the missions.

Gerstenmaier told reporters SpaceX recently discovered the suits were vulnerable to static electric discharges in the dry environment of vacuum with 100% oxygen flowing into the suit, a flammability risk, but they solved it. “They changed procedures, they’ve changed processes, they’ve added conductive material, and we’re truly ready to go fly.”

Issacman and Gillis will be the spacewalkers, first one and then the other. Crew Dragon doesn’t have an airlock so the entire spacecraft will be depressurized like those early days in the 1960s. All four crew members will be wearing the SpaceX EVA suits.

The spacewalkers won’t go far and will not float free. “Mobility devices” have been installed on the Crew Dragon hatch for them to hold onto with their hands and/or feet and to attach their tethers. They will each spend 15-20 minutes outside, testing how the suits function and feel.

The spacewalks are scheduled for Flight Day 3.  Before that, Crew Dragon will boost them to an altitude of 1,400 kilometers (870 miles), higher than any other earth-orbiting crewed spaceflight. They’ll lower the apogee to 700 kilometers (435 miles) before the spacewalks begin and continue lowering it until they reenter on Flight Day 6.

The spacewalk will be livestreamed. The mission also will test using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet system. A special device was built for Crew Dragon to communicate via laser links with the Starlink satellites. The capsule and the satellites will be travelling at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 km per hour) making communications a challenge.

“It’s no small task to have two objects going 17,500 miles per hour communicating over a beam of light,” Isaacman said, “but it has the opportunity to open up an entirely new communication pathway not just for Dragon, but for armadas of Starships or other satellites or telescopes out there and kind of free up some of the burden on the existing TDRS and ground station infrastructure.” TDRS is NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite system.

Isaacman is the mission commander.

Poteet is the mission pilot. A retired Air Force F-16 pilot, he went to work for Isaacman at another business he founded, Draken International, and then joined Shift4 as vice president of strategy and served as mission director for Inspiration4.

Menon and Gillis are SpaceX employees and worked with Isaacman preparing him and the Inspiration4 crew.

Gillis is a mission specialist on Polaris Dawn and will make one of the spacewalks. An engineer, she was lead astronaut trainer for Inspiration4 and serves as a Crew Operations and Resources Engineer (CORE) in SpaceX’s mission control, the equivalent of a NASA capsule communicator (CapCom).

Menon is a mission specialist and medical officer. An engineer and mission director at SpaceX, she earlier worked at NASA as a biomedical engineer on console in NASA’s Mission Control supporting orbiting astronauts. Her husband, Anil Menon, is a NASA astronaut.

Another mission objective is science. Menon said they have partnered with about 30 institutions around the world for a series of 40 science and research experiments in human health, research that takes advantage of the mission profile they are flying, and testing ways to make it easier for astronauts to readapt to Earth’s gravity.

They are also using the Polaris Dawn mission to again raise funds for St. Jude’s following on the success of Inspiration4, which brought in $250 million for the children’s research hospital. Founded by actor Danny Thomas in 1962, his goal was that “no child should die in the dawn of life.”