After a series of delays due to bad weather, the historic Polaris Dawn finally took off into space.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, carrying four non-professional astronauts, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 05:25 local time (10:25 BST).
The four-person team will fly up to 870 miles from Earth aboard a Falcon 9 rocket.
This will be the farthest journey from Earth that any human has made since the Apollo lunar missions and will take the crew into Earth’s radioactive Van Allen Belt.
The five-day mission aims to conduct the first spacewalk by private citizens, meaning those who do not work for national space agencies such as NASA.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule carrying the crew of the Polaris Dawn mission lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Sept. 10, 2024.
During their flight, Isaacman and the rest of the crew will reach an altitude of 1,400 kilometers (870 miles), the highest of any manned mission in more than half a century, dating back to the Apollo era. Pictured here, Tuesday’s launch
SpaceX confirmed the successful launch on X (Twitter) with a stunning photo and the caption: ‘Polaris Dawn liftoff!’
Polaris Dawn is a private, “first-of-its-kind” space mission involving four American engineers and pilots: Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.
Isaacman is a billionaire entrepreneur and commander of Inspiration4, a private spaceflight that will use SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience in September 2021.
Mr. Isaacman, the founder of the electronic payments company Shift4, funded the mission and selected his personal friend, Mr. Poteet, as the mission pilot.
He has declined to say how much he has spent, but estimates have been in excess of $100 million.
SpaceX confirmed the successful launch on X (Twitter) with a stunning photo and the caption: ‘Polaris Dawn liftoff!’
On X, formerly Twitter, SpaceX founder Elon Musk noted that this mission would be the “farthest from Earth that humans have been in over half a century.”
For Polaris Dawn, Isaacman and his crew will spend up to five days in orbit, flying higher than any Dragon mission to date and also attempting to reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown.
They will reach their maximum altitude on the first day of the mission, when Polaris Dawn briefly enters the Van Allen Belt, where Earth’s magnetic field traps highly charged and extremely dangerous particles.
They will also conduct a spacewalk and support scientific research designed to advance “the understanding of human health during future long-duration spaceflight.”
This will be the first human spacewalk conducted by astronauts not associated with any national space agency.
In a post on X, SpaceX said: ‘Dragon will begin a two-day pre-breathing process to prepare the crew for their next spacewalk on Thursday, September 12.’
The Polaris Dawn crew will now spend the next two days in a pre-breathing process to purge any nitrogen from their blood that could lead to decompression sickness.
On Thursday, the Polaris Dawn crew will embark on the first spacewalk by non-professional astronauts.
Going from the inside of the pressurized capsule to the vacuum of space can cause any dissolved gases in the bloodstream to expand, forming bubbles.
Just like a diver coming up from a depth, there is a risk that astronauts may develop decompression sickness during this transition.
To prevent this, the Polaris Dawn crew will spend the next two days breathing an oxygen-rich gas mixture to purge their bodies of nitrogen.
This is considerably longer than the two-hour pre-breath generally considered effective for astronauts embarking on spacewalks from the International Space Station.
The Polaris Dawn crew: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis. Isaacman, a billionaire, was the commander of Inspiration4, a private spaceflight using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience, which launched in September 2021.
It is a team of four engineers and pilots aboard the Crew Dragon, a reusable aircraft designed by the firm that Elon Musk founded in 2002.
More information coming soon