Groundbreaking Mission Attempting the First Private Astronaut Spacewalk Will Target Tuesday Launch

This week, a commercial spaceflight is scheduled to make history by carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman and three other crewmembers to Earth orbit.

During the five-day mission, the crew will travel farther away from Earth than any astronauts since the Apollo program, fly through a high-radiation environment and perform the first-ever commercial spacewalk.

“They’re pushing the envelope in multiple ways,” retired NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman tells Reuters’ Joey Roulette.

The mission, called Polaris Dawn, is the first of three trips to space under the Polaris Program, which is led by Isaacman. Polaris aims to test new technologies and conduct scientific research that could benefit future missions to the moon and Mars. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Polaris Dawn crew to Earth orbit aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft.

Initially slated for launch early Monday, the mission has been pushed by 24 hours to 3:38 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX, which announced the new launch date via a post on X, stated the delay will allow teams more time to “complete preflight checkouts.”

Isaacman, the mission commander, is the CEO of payment processing company Shift4 and a pilot with more than 7,000 hours of aviation experience. He purchased the three flights from SpaceX to form the Polaris mission, according to CNBC’s Michael Sheetz.

He’ll be joined on board by mission pilot Scott Poteet, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and close friend of Isaacman; mission specialist Sarah Gillis, a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX; and mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon, also a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX.

The team has trained together for two years in preparation for the mission. Poteet tells NPR’s Bill Chappell that they spent 2,000 hours in a simulator—more than the 1,500 hours of simulator training he received during the 20 years he spent flying in the Air Force.

Despite the astronauts’ extensive training, Isaacman told CNBC last month that he and the crew will be “surrounded by death” during the mission’s main event: a two-hour spacewalk.

To prepare for this unique endeavor, the astronauts will need to begin a “pre-breathe” process soon after reaching space. This 45-hour-long protocol will slowly decrease pressure in the cabin and raise its oxygen concentration in an effort to remove nitrogen from the crew’s blood, writes CNN’s Jackie Wattles.

During the spacewalk, the entire cabin will be depressurized and open to space. Isaacman and Poteet will leave the spacecraft on tethers, but “we’d say all four of us are doing it—there’s no airlock and it’s being vented down to vacuum” inside the spacecraft, Isaacman says to CNBC.

The spacewalk will help researchers learn about how to better design suits for longer-duration missions.

“The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions,” Isaacman said at a press conference, per Space News’ Jeff Foust. “It feels like a huge honor to have that opportunity to test it out on this flight.”

The crew will also fly through parts of a Van Allen radiation belt 870 miles above Earth’s surface—more than three times the height of the International Space Station. These two belts, which encircle Earth, trap high-energy particles from the sun that can be damaging to humans. If astronauts take long trips through space in the future, such as to Mars, scientists will need to better understand how exposure to space radiation impacts human health.

During the mission, the crew will also test laser-based satellite communication using links between the Dragon spacecraft and Starlink satellites. They’ll also conduct some 40 scientific experiments to better understand human health on Earth and in space.

They’ll study decompression sickness, a potentially life-threatening condition caused by bubbles of gas forming in the bloodstream during drops in pressure, like the one the astronauts will experience during the spacewalk. They’ll also study how space travel affects the brain and eyes. Long-duration space travel is known to shift cerebrospinal fluid in the brain, swell the ocular nerve and blur vision.

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Will Sullivan is a science writer based in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in Inside Science and NOVA Next.