The first completely private citizen spacewalk, also known as SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission, will launch in just a week, carrying out one of the riskiest extraterrestrial expeditions in decades, and becoming the first of its kind to be led by a billionaire, rather than an astronaut.
Jared Isaacman, the founder of payment services company Shift4, will help fund and command the mission, which is expected to take off on August 26th, and is scheduled to last five days. Isaacman last went to space in 2021 on Inspiration4, SpaceX’s first private mission, with a crew of three people, which consisted of two contest winners and a healthcare worker.
The flight will take the Polaris Dawn crew higher than anyone has gone into space since the 1970s on the Apollo 17 mission, entering the Van Allen radiation belts 870 miles above the Earth, and about 185 miles above the International Space Station, according to SpaceX. The spacecraft will also take early passes through the high radiation zone known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, where particle radiation can wipe out onboard computers and interfere with the data collection of satellites that pass through it.
This is the first of three planned missions in the Polaris program, all of which Isaacman will help fund and command, yet, the spacewalk is highly anticipated due to its ambitious objectives.
Joining Isaacman on the expedition are retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who is also a friend of Isaacman, and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, who will serve as a medical officer and mission specialist, respectively.
Another distinct aspect of the journey is that it will have a new type of spacesuit, technically known as an Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) suit, which SpaceX says it designed and developed in two and a half years.
While extravehicular activities, or EVAs, have been a regular part of NASA’s astronaut missions for years, usually when the agency needs maintenance done outside the International Space Station, no private mission has attempted an EVA before.
“Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require thousands of spacesuits; the development of this suit and the execution of the EVA will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions,” SpaceX said on the mission’s Webpage.
Polaris Dawn plans to livestream the spacewalk, and Isaacman told NBC News there are going to be “a lot of cameras” scattered inside and out of the capsule, adding that he hopes the mission pushes the boundaries of spaceflight and inspires future innovations.
