US billionaire Jared Isaacman is preparing to take the world’s first privately funded spacewalk in partnership with SpaceX and CEO Elon Musk.
The joint venture dubbed Polaris Dawn will launch from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center early in the morning of August 26 in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Ahead of the crew’s arrival in South Florida early Monday morning Musk tweeted late Sunday night “First SpaceX spacewalk mission launches in a week. This will be epic.”
Isaacman funded the first all-civilian orbital space flight on Inspiration4 in 2021. While both Inspiration4 and the Polaris Program are operated by SpaceX, they were both funded by Isaacman himself.
Isaacman made his fortune founding the payment processing company Shift4 Payments. Inspiration4 was originally billed as a cancer fundraiser, but Isaacman declined to disclose the amount he spent on the launch itself, instead pledging to donate $100 million to charity. Isaacman has similarly not made public the amount he has spent on the Polaris Program.
The mission will include Isaacman, two SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon as well as Isaacman’s close friend and 20 year US Air Force Veteran Scott Poteet. Gillis trained Isaacman on the Inspiration4 mission and Menon formerly worked for NASA.
The crew has gone through extensive training in preparation for this mission, spending upwards of 2,000 hours in a simulator, while also taking scuba and skydiving lessons and even climbed a volcano in Ecuador.
This mission holds special significance for both Gillis and Menon as they will become the two women who have travelled the farthest from earth.
The three main objectives of the mission are to reach an altitude of 1,400 kilometres or 870 miles, above the earth. By comparison the International Space Station is located 400 kilometres or 250 miles above the earth. This will be the farthest above the earth humans have travelled since the Apollo lunar missions, which saw its last mission in 1972.
Next will be to test the laser communications between the spacecraft and SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. And lastly will be the spacewalk which will be streamed live on the third day of the mission. The crew will also perform dozens of experiments aboard the spacecraft.
