Three years ago, millionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman took a revolutionary trip into space: He was the first person to board a spacecraft without a professional astronaut inside. This week, the commercial air travel pioneer is taking off again, and he and three other trained millionaires will undertake a longer, bolder and riskier journey. On this mission, the four non-professional astronauts are expected to perform the first-ever amateur spacewalk. The mission, which launches Tuesday, is called Polaris Dawn, and to do it, Isaacman has been working closely with Elon Musk and his rocket company SpaceX, which will provide, among other things, the Falcon 9 propellant.
Polaris Dawn isn’t headed to a space station, but it plans to travel farther than any mission since Apollo 17, which reached the moon in 1972. “It’s a mission that’s going to accomplish a lot in a very short period of time,” Isaacman said in an interview last week. The millionaires will traverse areas of high radiation and risk being hit by small space rocks, as well as fragments of man-made debris, which could penetrate the ship.
The flight will test new technologies and collect data on their effects on the human body. One of the main novelties will be the spacesuit developed by SpaceX, which will be used during the spacewalk. The suit is designed to send communications via laser pulses — rather than radio signals — between the flight capsule — Crew Dragon — and SpaceX’s Starlink constellation of internet satellites. “We have very ambitious goals,” Isaacman said.
The key moment of the mission, a spacewalk, is scheduled for the third day of the flight. The astronauts will don their spacesuits before releasing all the air from Crew Dragon. That way, for the two hours it will take, the interior of the capsule will become part of the vacuum of outer space. Two crew members, including Isaacman, will step outside the spacecraft to test out the new suits. The astronauts will be attached to a cable that will supply them with power, air and other vital needs.
In addition, the crew will conduct about 40 experiments, and even obtain MRI images of the astronauts’ brains. There will also be attempts to obtain X-ray images using the natural radiation showers that stream into outer space. “We will devote every moment of our time in orbit to addressing these issues to take advantage of this opportunity,” said Scott Poteat, one of the astronauts who will launch.
One test that ultimately did not go forward involved Scott Petit himself, who underwent surgery to install a measuring device that measured the pressure of the fluid surrounding the brain. The mission wanted to see if the pressure of this fluid could be one of the reasons some astronauts experience symptoms such as crushed eyeballs, optic neuritis and blurred vision. The measuring device was eventually pulled because it “didn’t work.”
The five-day mission will end with a landing on the Florida coast.
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