SpaceX space mission: Spacewalk
Four private citizens are set to blast off next week on an ambitious SpaceX space mission.
This is a pioneering proposal that is expected to include the first spacewalk performed entirely by a commercial crew.
SpaceX’s new all-private space mission, dubbed Polaris Dawn, will blast off Monday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida between 3:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. ET.
Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of payment processing company Shift4, will be the commander of the Polaris Dawn flight.
It is the first of three planned space flights Isaacman is funding and organizing in partnership with SpaceX, collectively known as the Polaris program.
Isaacman launches into space as part of SpaceX’s first all-civilian mission to orbit in 2021.
The commercial SpaceX space mission will have three crewmembers: Scott “Kidd,” Poteet, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, who will be the pilot, and two SpaceX engineers, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.
They will travel to space in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
The plan for the five-day mission is to send them to an orbital altitude more than three times that of the International Space Station, the highest humans have reached since the last Apollo mission to the Moon in 1972.
Three days into the flight will come the spacewalk, in which two crew members will exit the capsule tethered to a tether for up to 20 minutes.
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SpaceX space mission: Spacewalk
Previously, only astronauts from government space agencies had performed spacewalks to build or improve orbiting space stations, repair satellites and complete scientific experiments.
Isaacman and his crewmates have spent the past two years training for the flight.
“Throughout our mission, we will seek to inspire humanity to look up and imagine what we can accomplish here on Earth and on worlds beyond our own,” Isaacman said Monday in a statement.
SpaceX’s space mission envisions commercial astronauts conducting dozens of science experiments and testing laser-based satellite communication using SpaceX’s Starlink satellites during their five days in space.
Their Crew Dragon capsule will soar to altitudes up to 870 miles above the planet’s surface, far enough to pass through parts of the inner Van Allen radiation belt, a doughnut-shaped zone of high-energy radiation particles that are trapped in place by Earth’s magnetosphere.
The flight is designed to study the health of astronauts and their spacecraft in different space radiation environments.
Telemundo
