ELON Musk’s SpaceX attempts the first-ever private spacewalk in a historic moment for space travel.
The Polaris Dawn crew has now started the mission to step into the vacuum of space around 400 miles above the Earth after blasting into orbit on Tuesday.
It will be the first time in history that a group of amateur astronauts will attempt a spacewalk and the furthest humans have travelled from Earth in over 50 years.
The Polaris Dawn crew will do it without the usual training, from a space capsule while testing a new line of spacesuits.
The newly developed SpaceX suits are equipped with heads-up displays, helmet cameras, and advanced joint mobility systems.
The team have been orbiting Earth aboard SpaceX‘s Crew Dragon since their pre-dawn launch from from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday.
It reached a peak altitude of 870 miles – higher than any crewed space flight since the 1972 Apollo 17 Moon mission and the record set by Gemini 11 in 1966.
The elite group consists of mission commander billionaire Jared Isaacman, 41, retired military fighter pilot Scott Poteet, 50, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38.
Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft tethered by an oxygen line while Poteet and Menon will stay inside the cabin.
The duo will take turns peeking out from a hatch structure dubbed “Skywalker.”
“It’ll look like we’re doing a little bit of a dance,” Isaacman said during a recent press conference.
“What they’re actually doing is stress testing their next-generation suit to inform future design evolution.”
Since the Crew Dragon capsule lacks an airlock, the entire crew will be exposed to the vacuum of space for around two hours.
They will also conduct 38 science experiments to study the effects of spaceflight and space radiation on human health.
The elite Polaris Dawn crew consists of four people who will attempt the daring mission of stepping into the space vaccum 400 miles above Earth.
Jared Isaacman
The mission commander is 41-year-old Isaacman – also the billionaire founder of electronic payment company Shift4.
He is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.
Even though he has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions,he is likely to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars based on Crew Dragon’s roughly $55 million (£42m) per-seat price for other flights.
Scott Poteet
The spacecraft’s pilot is retired Air Force fighter pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, 50.
Poteet who is Isaacman’s close friend, has 20 years of military service including as a commander of the 64th Aggressor Squadron and flying with the Thunderbirds display team.
He is Kidd is also an accomplished collegiate runner and triathlete, competing in 15 Ironman triathlons since 2000.
Sarah Gillis
Space X employee Gillis, 30 is a senior engineer – and the one who will step into orbit alongside Isaacman.
She recently trained the Inspiration4 astronauts, the first all-civilian crew to go to orbit.
Anna Menon
Another Mission Specialist is 38-year-old Menon.
She previously worked at NASA as a biomedical flight controller for the International Space Station.
All four underwent more than two years of training in preparation for the landmark mission, logging hundreds of hours on simulators as well as skydiving, centrifuge training, scuba diving, and summiting an Ecuadoran volcano.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.
Analysis by Jamie Harris, Assistant Technology and Science Editor
The Polaris Dawn mission comes after two years of careful planning and is a huge deal for all involved.
For Nasa, it’s key to demonstrate once again that massively expensive space exploration is safe in the hands of billionaires willing to fork out.
But more crucially, the US is looking to flex its space muscles once more in face of competition from China.
China has been rapidly moving on with plans to build a base on the Moon and recently announced it’s aiming to carry out a Mars sample return mission around 2028.
Elon Musk also has his eyes set on Mars.
His Starship megarocket is poised to blast off, uncrewed, to Mars in 2026.
In a recent tweet, the billionaire said if those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in four years.
Eventually, he wants to build a colony on Mars – but that all feels extremely far off when Polaris Dawn is only taking us 870 miles above Earth today.
