SpaceX prepares for historic spacewalk

Merritt Island: Elon Musk's SpaceX is preparing to launch the Polaris Dawn Mission, which will feature the first-ever spacewalk by private citizens. The operation, said to be one of the company’s riskiest, is scheduled for launch on Tuesday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The mission will see two members of a four-person crew test new spacesuits developed by the Elon Musk-backed company. It is funded by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur who also paid for a flight with SpaceX completed about three years ago. SpaceX executives and mission participants said the flight would help advance the space-exploration aims such as a human mission to Mars.

A mission spokeswoman said that the spacewalk is scheduled to take place a couple of days later, while details on the timing of the walk will be released after the launch.

In addition to the spacewalk, the Polaris Dawn mission will transport astronauts farther into space than humans have reached in decades, according to a statement.

Apart from Isaacman, the other participants in the mission are Scott Poteet, a former Air Force pilot, and SpaceX operations engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. During the spacewalk, all four participants will face challenges, while their Crew Dragon vehicle will orbit Earth around 435 miles above sea level.

Isaacman and crew member Sarah Gillis are slated to exit the vehicle for around 15-20 minutes and conduct various demonstrations to see how the suits perform.

The mission was announced in February 2022, and the training of the four crew members has included skydiving and spending time in a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

They spent around 2,000 hours in a flight simulator and practised becoming used to hypoxic symptoms, which occur when the body’s oxygen levels drop.

Beyond the spacewalk, the mission has other objectives, including a test of the Starlink satellite communications system and science experiments. The crew will reach an orbit of 870 miles above Earth, the highest altitude achieved by any crew since NASA’s Apollo moon missions.

Is there any risk?

Spacewalks carry significant risks to those conducting them. Astronauts are enclosed in a device that must protect them from the vacuum of space, where debris speeds by at around 17,000 miles per hour and temperatures can be extreme. NASA announced in June that it had to halt a spacewalk at the International Space Station early due to a water leak in astronaut Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit. “You’re throwing away all the safety of your vehicle. Your suit becomes your spaceship,” Isaacman said during a recent briefing about the mission.

Meanwhile, NASA announced on August 24 that SpaceX would help bring back two astronauts parked at the ISS since early June. The astronauts, Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams have been unable to leave the station because the space agency is concerned about the Boeing vehicle that transported them there.