WASHINGTON, Sept 11 (Askume) – A group of private astronauts will carry out the first private spacewalk on a SpaceX capsule on Thursday, testing a new series of space suits in the company’s most dangerous mission yet.
A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees took off from Florida on Tuesday morning to orbit Earth aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft following the Polaris Dawn mission, the latest and riskiest attempt by the Musk-led company to push the boundaries of commercial space flight.
The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 2:23 a.m. ET (0623 GMT) at an altitude of 700 kilometers (435 miles), with two astronauts exiting the Crew Dragon spacecraft while the other two remain inside. The capsule will be completely unpressurized, and the crew will have to rely on thin spacesuits developed by SpaceX for oxygen.
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4 (FOUR.N) , is funding the Polaris mission the same way he is doing for SpaceX. The 2021 Inspiration4 flight did just that. He declined to say how much he would pay for the mission, but based on the roughly $55 million per seat on other Crew Dragon flights, the cost could be in the hundreds of millions.
Other Polaris members include mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna May, 38; Anna Menon, both senior engineers at the company.
Farthest since Apollo
On Wednesday, the Crew Dragon spacecraft orbited Earth at least six times in an elliptical orbit 190 kilometers deep on one side and 1,400 kilometers long on the other, making it the longest duration for humans flying in space since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.
On Wednesday night, the Polaris Project posted on social media that the gummy-shaped spacecraft began lowering its orbit to an altitude of 700 kilometers and adjusting cabin pressure to perform the spacewalk, officially known as extravehicular activity (EVA).
“The crew spent several hours demonstrating the suit’s pressurization strength, verifying positioning and access in microgravity, and preparing for extra-vehicular activities,” the statement said.
During the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will leave the Crew Dragon spacecraft connected to oxygen tubes, while Poteat and Menon will remain in the capsule.
In the past, only government astronauts with years of training could walk in space. Since the construction of the International Space Station in 2000, about 270 astronauts have walked in space, and Chinese astronauts have also walked in space 16 times aboard the Tiangong Space Station in Beijing.
The first American space flight was in a Gemini capsule in 1965, and a similar procedure was used for the Polaris Dawn mission: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch opened, and an astronaut in a spacesuit was pulled out along with the passengers. Ropes help.
During the mission, the private Polaris astronauts will be the primary subjects of scientific research exploring how the human body responds to deep space and interacts with the International Space Station. But it will also help supplement the government’s decades-old study on astronaut health.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft is the only American vehicle capable of reliably putting humans into orbit and returning them to Earth, having carried more than a dozen astronaut missions since 2021, primarily for NASA. The agency promoted the capsule’s development as part of a plan to create a commercial, privately built American vehicle capable of carrying American astronauts to the International Space Station.
Boeing’s Starliner capsule was developed under the same program as NASA but is far behind. Starliner launched the first astronauts to the International Space Station in June, but it had a troubled test mission that ended this month with the capsule returning empty , leaving no room for the astronauts who will launch aboard Crew Dragon next year.
