SpaceX is now Aug. 26 for the launch of Polaris Dawn, a crewed flight into Earth orbit that will include the first personal spacewalk.
The news, announced today (August 7) by the Polaris Dawn team via an article on X, reinforces an indistinct window into the past; The recent maximum target of the revolutionary project was mid-August.
Polaris Dawn will send four more people into Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which will blast off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
These 4 team members are billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, who will lead the project; pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, retired U. S. Air Force lieutenant colonel; and project Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both SpaceX engineers.
Polaris Dawn will carry the quartet into Earth orbit, as part of a free flight project without connection to the International Space Station (ISS). Planned personal spacewalks are the only way to make history: Polaris Dawn will circle our planet at an altitude of about 435 miles (700 kilometers), taking the team farther from Earth than any project since the Apollo era .
Polaris Dawn is the first of three crewed projects planned in the Polaris program, all of which will use SpaceX hardware. Isaacman will command and fund all 3 flights, as he did with Inspiration4, an innovative SpaceX project to Earth orbit in September 2021.
Related: How SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn Private Astronauts Will Attempt the First ‘All-Civilian’ Spacewalk
Polaris Dawn was originally scheduled to launch on 2022. La scheduled date has been delayed several times, in part due to the pioneering complexity of this ambitious mission.
SpaceX already has a crewed project in orbit right now: Crew-8, which sent 4 astronauts to the ISS for NASA last March for a six-month stay. The Crew-8 quartet will soon return home, to be replaced by the Crew-9 astronauts, whose release is scheduled for the orbiting laboratory on September 24.
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Michael Wall is Senior Space Editor at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but has been known to delve into the realm of space art. His book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in clinical writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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