(Credit: SpaceX)
UPDATE 8/27: The mission has been delayed until at least 3:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Aug. 28 after a "ground-side helium leak" was found on a connector.
Original Story:
Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman is cleared for takeoff on a private SpaceX rocket.
The 41-year-old founder of payment tech company Shift4 bankrolled the mission, dubbed Polaris Dawn, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 27. He spent two years training for it along with his three other crew members—Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.
"We are incredibly thankful for this opportunity and to the thousands of SpaceX engineers who have contributed to this endeavor," Isaacman says. "Throughout our mission, we will aim to inspire humankind to look up and imagine what we can achieve here on Earth and in the worlds beyond our own.”
The Dragon aircraft will orbit in an oval path, traveling as close to Earth as 118 miles and as far away as 870 miles—the farthest humans have traveled since the 1972 Apollo moon program.
At 434 miles, the crew will attempt a 20-minute spacewalk, venturing into an empty expanse. Only government astronauts have performed spacewalks to date, and at 250 miles above Earth on the International Space Station. The Polaris Dawn crew will also be performing a runway show of sorts, modeling their SpaceX-developed Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suits.
The suits are specifically designed to improve comfort and safety during a spacewalk. The SpaceX team designed them with "new materials, fabrication processes, and novel joint designs to provide greater flexibility to astronauts in pressurized scenarios while retaining comfort for unpressurized scenarios," SpaceX says.
The outfit pairs with a 3D-printed helmet with a glare-resistant visor, a heads-up display, and a camera, which provides information on the suit’s pressure, temperature, and relative humidity.
The crew plans to test Starlink laser-based internet along the way and perform 36 experiments on behalf of partners such as NASA, Johns Hopkins University, and Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. They aim to test new technologies and better understand how humans could adapt to living and working in space.
"The Polaris Dawn crew will combine their expertise, knowledge, and passion for spaceflight to further human space exploration," says SpaceX.
Isaacman already went to space in 2021. This mission marks the first of three for the so-called Polaris Program, an effort he organized with SpaceX to "demonstrate important operational capabilities that will serve as building blocks to help further human exploration to the Moon, Mars, and beyond," according to the initiative's website.
It will be the rest of the crew's first time in space and the first time any SpaceX employees have been part of a spaceflight crew, which will provide "valuable insight" toward the company's goal of making humans a multi-planetary species.
Takeoff is scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 27, at 3:38 a.m. ET at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will be live-streamed on spacex.com and on X.