Update 8:19 p.m. ET: SpaceX has backed out of the Tuesday morning launch window and is moving to a 24-hour backup window on Wednesday, August 28.
The first commercial astronaut mission in human history is set to launch in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday. The four members of the Polaris Dawn mission will climb aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft for a nearly five-day free-flying mission orbiting Earth.
The crew, led by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, will go further than humans have gone since the Apollo missions ended more than 50 years ago, and will conduct the first commercial spacewalk in history.
SpaceX was originally scheduled to launch the mission Tuesday morning, but opted to delay the launch by 24 hours. The rocket was lowered to a horizontal position around 5 p.m. ET (2100 GMT) on Monday for “additional pre-launch checks.”
Just after 8 p.m. ET, the company said: “Teams are closely examining the helium leak on the ground side of the Quick Disconnect umbilical. Falcon and Dragon remain healthy and the crew remains ready for their multi-day mission to low Earth orbit.”
While it is sad to miss tonight’s launch attempt, I am very proud of the team that was able to identify the problem and then work to fix it. Nothing is more important than the safety of our astronauts and the reliability of our spacecraft and operations. https://t.co/hBOeYOCUm0
— Kiko Donchev (@TurkeyBeaver) August 27, 2024
Isaacman was joined on the flight by pilot Scott “Kid” Poteet; mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon; and mission specialist Sarah Gillis. Menon and Gillis will be the first SpaceX employees to travel to space.
The Falcon 9 rocket supporting this mission is scheduled to lift off from Launch Complex 39A at 3:38 a.m. EST (0738 GMT). If needed, SpaceX has two additional launch opportunities during the Wednesday window at 5:23 a.m. EST (0923 GMT) and 7:09 a.m. EST (1109 GMT).
Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the mission starting about 4 hours before liftoff.
Menon, who often writes her memoirs, said she looked forward to recording this journey for more than just her own memories.
“I try to capture a number of things. Especially as we get closer to the flight, it’s really clear, time flies, it’s fast and our days are filled with excitement leading up to the mission, but especially leading up to the launch,” Menon told Spaceflight Now in July. “I try to write down the details because I know that one day I’ll look back and it’ll be very blurry, I guess. I try to write down the details so that one day I can look back and remember all the nuances of this experience.”
“But I’m also trying to capture my emotions and the experiences that I have with my crewmates and this amazing team at SpaceX so that I can not only transport myself back to the technical details, but also the emotions that I had going through this.”
The Polaris Dawn flight will be Isaacman’s second time in space and the Shift4 Payments CEO’s second time serving as mission commander on a Crew Dragon spacecraft. Isaacman will also become the second person to fly on Dragon twice, following Axiom Space astronaut Michael López-Alegría’s second flight on Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) earlier this year.
“It takes a tremendous team effort to bring a mission like Polaris Dawn to life. Together, we are making incredible progress for the future — both in space and here on Earth,” Isaacman wrote in a social media post following the mission readiness review on Monday morning. “We can do both.”
It takes a massive team effort to accomplish a mission like Polaris Dawn. Together, we are making incredible progress for the future—both in space and here on Earth.
We can do both. https://t.co/iOuBuTFJHG
– Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) August 26, 2024
The Falcon 9 booster, which carries tail number B1083 in SpaceX’s fleet, will launch for the fourth time on this flight. It previously powered the Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station as well as sending two batches of SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft on top stands 65 meters (213.3 feet) tall. The Dragon spacecraft, dubbed “Resilience,” will make its third trip into space after the launch of Crew-1 and Inspiration4, Isaacman’s first flight outside Earth.
Since Resilience will launch into a 190 by 1,200-kilometer (118 by 746-mile) orbit at a 51.6-degree inclination, B1083 will land on SpaceX’s “A Shortfall of Gravitas” drone ship, about 9.5 minutes after liftoff.
“the @Polaris Program “Our mission readiness review has just concluded and we are now preparing for launch in just 24 hours,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote in a social media post. “Crew safety is paramount and this mission carries higher risks than usual, as it will be the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spacewalk!”
“If any concerns arise, the launch will be postponed until those concerns are addressed.”
the @Polaris Program The mission readiness review has just concluded and we are currently preparing for launch in just 24 hours.
The safety of the crew is of the utmost importance, and this mission carries greater risks than usual, as it will be the farthest distance humans have traveled from Earth since Apollo and… https://t.co/4TEwupwldQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2024
Recording distance
During the first day of the flight, the rocket will raise its apogee—the highest point in orbit—to 1,400 kilometers (870 miles). At that distance, the Polaris Dawn crew will have flown farther from Earth than any human since the end of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
“When you go into this environment, you’re dealing with very different realities than you would deal with, say, when you go to the space station,” Isaacman said in a pre-launch briefing. “It’s a lot of energy going into the vehicle, and there’s a lot of energy that has to be taken out of the vehicle when you come home. It’s a different radiation environment. It’s a different environment for orbital debris, micrometeoroids.”
“So we get a lot out of this experience in terms of human health, science and research. And if we ever get to Mars, we want to go back there healthy enough to tell people about it.”
The distance would also give Gillis and Menon the distinction of being the women who have traveled farthest from Earth ever. NASA astronaut Christina Koch will break that record when the Artemis 2 mission launches on a trip around the moon no later than September 2025.
Gillis joined SpaceX as it advanced the human spaceflight program leading up to the May 2020 Demo-2 mission, which was aboard former NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley. Being part of the mission to prepare Dragon for the effects of the Van Allen radiation belts and the first commercial spacewalk was a huge moment, she said.
“So it’s been really cool over the last couple of years to start this process again, almost like a completely different development program where we’re adding a whole nitrogen suppression system to the spacecraft. We have to make sure we have the right mobility aids to support a crew member during an EVA,” Gillis said. “It’s been really cool and really special for me, given my context of why Dragon is what it is, but now I get to help develop a completely new spacesuit and test how it integrates into the spacecraft and how it can actually support a spacewalk.”
“So that’s been a really cool thing for me to be involved in over the last couple of years.”
Spacewalk on Skywalker
The highlight of the mission for many people, both inside and outside SpaceX and the Polaris program, will be the spacewalk that will take place on the third day of the flight.
Because the Crew Dragon has no air chamber, the entire vehicle will be lowered into a vacuum during a spacewalk. Isaac and Walker will emerge from the Dragon capsule, one by one, supported by a hand-and-foot railing system called SkyWalker.
The Star Wars tribute comes after the rocket itself was named Falcon 9, a nod to the Millennium Falcon rocket that appeared in all the films.
Much of their training over the past two and a half years has focused on pre-breathing protocols to purge their bodies of nitrogen. The process will begin about an hour after they reach orbit and continue slowly over two days leading up to the third day of the flight.
“This pre-breathing is designed to help mitigate the risk of decompression sickness when we enter the vacuum of spacesuits,” Gillis said. “Over the course of about 45 hours, we will slowly lower the cabin pressure and increase the oxygen concentration to help mitigate the risk.”
The entire spacewalk will take about two hours, and SpaceX plans to livestream the event using various cameras positioned around the Dragon spacecraft. As someone who trains astronauts to work with the capsule and spacesuits, Gillis said she’s eager to test them out herself in the field in orbit.
“I think the most interesting thing is what does this look like in space? It’s from start to finish. You know, we go from concept design to actually experiencing this in orbit. So I’m really interested in seeing what we learn from doing spacewalks, and what are the ways we need to modify our training for future spacewalks,” Gillis said. “But it should be really interesting to see the whole design evolution come together.”
Poteet said the training he and his crewmates received from SpaceX teams gives him great confidence in the mission ahead.
“Thousands of hours in the simulator is what helped build our confidence in handling whatever scenario Melissa decided to throw at us,” Poteet said, referring to one of SpaceX’s trainers. “It was very challenging… but experiencing that and trying to figure out what went wrong and then how to work together to solve those problems definitely built our confidence in our ability to handle those very low-probability scenarios in orbit.”
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