SpaceX launches the risky Polaris Dawn mission, the first commercial spacewalk

SpaceX is also taking the opportunity to promote Elon Musk’s biggest ambition: sending humans to Mars.

This is not the space-tourist you might imagine. The Polaris Dawn crew plans to conduct experiments and test technologies for Mars, including the first attempt at a new method of spacewalking.

“We’re really starting to push the boundaries with the private sector and learn new things that we couldn’t learn if we stayed in a risk-free environment here on Earth,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of construction and flight. reliability, he said in an Aug. 19 briefing.

“It’s time to get out, it’s time to explore, it’s time to do these big things and move forward,” Gerstenmaier added.

Polaris Dawn plans to fly through a radiation belt

Along with Isaacman, the crew includes a former US Air Force pilot named Scott Poteet and two SpaceX engineers, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.

They are scheduled to spend about five days in space, flying farther from Earth than anyone has gone since the Apollo era more than 50 years ago.

As they travel up to 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) from Earth’s surface, they should pass through the Van Allen radiation belts, which are two donuts of intense radiation that surround the Earth.

They plan to study how that environment affects their bodies, since future missions to Mars would expose passengers to massive amounts of space radiation for months at a time.

A spacewalk plan, the first of its kind

On day three, if all goes according to plan, they’ll take a spacewalk. About 700 kilometers (435 miles) above Earth, the crew plans to don a set of new spacesuits, open the Crew Dragon’s hatch, and send Isaacman and Gillis into space on umbilical cables, each of them maintaining contact with the on the spaceship.

Since the Dragon has no airlock, this will depressurize the ship’s cabin and expose its entire interior to the void.

A Dragon spacecraft has never been opened like this in the vacuum of space.

“You’re taking on a lot of risk at that point,” Isaacman said, adding that he believed SpaceX had mitigated risk well through testing and spacecraft improvements.

He said the spacewalk was the main focus of mission preparations, almost to the point where he worried it would be “way too focused” on it. SpaceX also put every part of the mission through “paranoia reviews,” starting over to check everything, he said.

When astronauts perform spacewalks from the space station, they do a process of “pre-breathing”: they breathe pure oxygen for several hours to remove nitrogen from their blood. Otherwise, the drop in air pressure from the spacewalk could cause nitrogen to bubble up in their blood and give them a dangerous condition called “elbows.”

Polaris Dawn also plans to do a pre-breather, but stretches it out over 48 hours while slowly depressurizing the cabin. They have already practiced this in a two-day field simulation.

“I like the plan,” Abhi Tripathi, a former Dragon mission director at SpaceX who now leads mission operations at UC Berkeley’s Space Science Laboratory, told BI in an email. “It’s a rational and incremental step, paid for in part by a private individual.”

He added that the Crew Dragon was designed “from the ground up” to withstand unplanned depressurization events and that he sees “no particular risk”.

New SpaceX spacesuits

A major goal of the spacewalk is testing SpaceX’s first extravehicular spacesuits, which use new textiles and joint designs for increased mobility. The suits also have a heads-up display in the mask that shows the wearer real-time information about the suit’s internal pressure, temperature and humidity.

“You’re throwing away all the safety of your vehicle,” Isaacman said of the spacewalk.

“Your suit becomes your spaceship,” he added.

Crew Dragon has a strong spaceflight record, except for the toilet

Dragon spacecraft have carried eight crews of astronauts to and from the space station for NASA, as well as four private missions.

The vehicle’s first private mission—which was also the world’s first all-tourist spaceflight—was also sponsored and led by Isaacman. That flight, called Inspiration4, carried its four passengers through Earth orbit for three days.

It went without a hitch except for a toilet malfunction on board the Dragon. A tube carrying urine broke off in a compartment under the spacecraft cabin floor.

The pee did not reach the cabin where the passengers lived. Other than repairing a toilet system fan that set off an alarm, the crew said they didn’t notice the contamination until they landed.

Isaacman and his new Polaris Dawn crew fly on the same spacecraft.

Isaacman’s Polaris program plans to fly the first humans on the Starship

This is just the first mission of SpaceX and Isaacman’s Polaris program. The project has yet to announce details for its second mission.

The program’s third mission, however, is set to be the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s mammoth spacecraft. This is the rocket ship that Musk plans to one day use to transport a million people to Mars.

The starship, which is taller than the Statue of Liberty, flew into space and returned in one piece for the first time in June. It still has many test flights ahead before SpaceX plans to put a Polaris crew on board.