CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The personal astronauts of the American billionaire’s Polaris Dawn flight to attempt the world’s first personal spacewalk landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Monday, August 19, a week before their launch into space.
Polaris Dawn is the second SpaceX project with a personal crew funded by billionaire philanthropist Jared Isaacman, and the first of at least three launches that the “Polaris” program hopes to bring to light. The launch follows Isaacman’s 2021 Inspiration4 project, in which he and three other citizens presented the first all-civilian spaceflight. Inspiration4 helped raise $250 million for St. Louis. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and Isaacman hopes to build on that momentum through the trio of Polaris projects.
Starting with Dawn, Isaacman saw the Polaris program as a way to pioneer private spaceflight and demonstrate the clinical return of enlisted astronauts to space. As part of this effort, Isaacman and the rest of the Polaris Dawn team will fly farther from Earth than any human in part to a century and perform the first all-civilian spacewalk to test SpaceX’s new spacesuits.
The project is expected to launch no earlier than August 26 from KSC Launch Complex-3nineA. Attached to the same Crew Dragon that introduced Inspiration4, Isaacman, the project commander, will pilot a Falcon nine rocket into orbit alongside Polaris Dawn teammate Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired U. S. Air Force lieutenant colonel ( USAF). serving as a pilot project. He joins Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, leading space operations engineers at SpaceX and the first workers to reach space aboard one of the company’s rockets, as project specialists.
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The team arrived today, piloting a small squadron of aerobatic planes owned by Isaacman, landing them one by one on the runway once used for the return of the space shuttle. After landing, the Polaris Dawn team met with reporters in the SpaceX hangar. Launch and landing facility.
“Each of those projects will be packed with a series of goals intended to advance SpaceX’s vision of making life multiplanetary, but you can count, as is the case with this project, that we will use every moment for science and technology. ” research, as well as to help St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,” Isaacman told reporters.
He also pledged to pursue those goals “for the Polaris program. “
Polaris Dawn was originally scheduled to launch in 2022, but was delayed several times while the project’s hardware was in development. Specifically, the team was awaiting design and production of SpaceX’s new EVA suit, as well as the finishing touches on the handrail/ladder apparatus attached to the Crew Dragon hatch on SpaceX’s spacewalk. crew.
Meanwhile, Isaacman and his team have been preparing for their mission. In the 3 years since Inspiration4’s good luck, the team has undergone a multitude of endurance and team-building exercises, adding climbing, skydiving, scuba diving, and high-G jet flights and team spirit have been demonstrated.
“It’s one of the hardest workouts I’ve ever had,” Poteet said.
Poteet flew fighter jets in the U. S. Air Force. He has been in the U. S. for 20 years, and during that time, he claims to have completed around 1,400 hours of training in an air combat simulator. In contrast, over the next two years, he and the rest of the Polaris Dawn team have completed some 2,000 hours of similar training. “I couldn’t believe there was a more professional team than those three Americans who are leading the advance and preparing for this mission,” Poteet told reporters.
The team also has complete confidence in their spacecraft. The launch will be SpaceX’s first team launch since the Falcon nine rocket was temporarily grounded last month following a malfunction in the vehicle’s second stage, which resulted in the loss of 20 Starlink satellites.
“SpaceX has done an incredible job of keeping us informed every step of the way,” Menon said Monday. “Seconds after that happened, we would reach out to SpaceX and then they would keep us updated each and every one of them. “And every day, as SpaceX solved the problem, I looked at it, tried to figure out what was going on, and fixed it very quickly. I would say that it inspired confidence in me. I think that, like SpaceXer, it is. I wasn’t even surprised at all. That’s how SpaceX does business, and they make sure to take a look at all the data, access it. Root cause and then expand all the mandatory answers to get to the other side. And so I believe. It’s been a confidence-inspiring journey,” Menon said.
Polaris Dawn will spend five days in space, embarking on an elliptical trajectory around Earth, where Dragon will complete several orbits before raising its maximum altitude, or apogee, to about 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), more than any human has flown since the last Project Apollo in 1972. Of the approximately 40 experiments in the crew manifest, the maximum will be carried out at this altitude. One such experiment, for example, is a laser communication control that will use SpaceX’s Starlink network of megaconstellations of satellites to transmit a message. to Earth.
“You would think that getting it could be as simple as just reversing that transfer and activating yourArray, but it’s not,” Gillis told reporters.
“We’re talking about a laser that sends data to a Starlink satellite that travels at orbital speed to Earth and then returns. So it’s been a progressive effort by the SpaceX team and, as a private note,” Gillis added: ” “I have a special interest in this progression effort and we have a special message that we will be in percentage with the world that employs this technology. ”
One of the main objectives of the Polaris Dawn project will be to test SpaceX’s new EVA suit. Visibly, the suit looks like a thicker edition of SpaceX’s previous spacesuit, designed only to work inside a spacecraft. But the new suits will need to operate outdoors on a spacecraft and will feature improved materials, a thermal control formula and a new coating on the helmet’s visor. They also feature front-facing cameras and data presentations.
Once EVA day arrives and the team seals their spacesuits to open the Dragon door, they will have approximately two hours between cabin depressurization and the final touch of testing their suit. Gillis explained the procedure, in which two of the 4 team members will exit the vehicle completely:
“About an hour into orbit, we will begin preparations for EVA, where we will begin a pre-breathing protocol. This pre-breathing is designed to help mitigate the risk of decompression sickness when we go into vacuum in the spacesuits. So an hour later We will lightly press the capsule and over the course of about forty-five hours we will slowly reduce the cabin pressure and increase the oxygen concentration to help mitigate the risk and that will take us to the start of our EVA.
On the second day of the flight, we will be pressurized in the attacks and we will attend a demonstration of mobility where we will review the series and internal movements of the ship to make sure that we have not lacked anything in our formation and that we are autonomous. insured before. We fainted.
Watch a replay of today’s ⬇️ Polaris Dawn project briefing August https://t. co/YhxEgipfiA pic. twitter. com/RDSZnegshf19, 2024
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The third day of the flight is the spacewalk. So that morning we’ll do life and suit checks before we’re all pressurized with 100 percent oxygen. We will perform the final pre-breathing with one hundred percent oxygen before ventilating the spacecraft. Once in the vacuum, EV1 will open the hatch before EV1 and EV2, in series, exit and complete the verification matrix discussed by Jared regarding the suit’s mobility objectives. Once complete, EV2 will close the hatch, then we will continue to repressurize the spacecraft and then continue science and studies for the remainder of the mission. »
Details about the next two Polaris missions are still being worked out, but Isaacman has plans.
“The second project will build on what we learned from the first,” he said. “The third project will be the first manned flight of the Starship. “
The first launch window for Polaris Dawn opens on Monday, August 26 at approximately 3:30 a. m. PT. m. EDT (07:30 GMT).
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Josh Dinner is the content manager at Space. com. He is an amateur science and space exploration photographer and has been working in the area since 2016. Josh has covered the evolution of NASA’s spaceflight advertising partnerships, dating back to the first Dragon. and Cygnus delivery missions to ongoing progression and launches of crewed missions from the Space Coast, as well as NASA science missions and more. He also enjoys building 1:144 scale models of human-piloted rockets and spacecraft. Find some of Josh’s release photos on Instagram and his website, and stay with him on Twitter, where he most frequently posts haikus.
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