Billionaire finally launched on First Private Space-Walk Mission

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One of those launched the most ambitious space tourism missions in history, with the all-commercial crew set to hit several milestones during its five days in space, including the first privately funded space walk human space.

The mission, called Polaris Dawn, took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida today, Tuesday, September 10, at 5.23 am Eastern Time. The four-person crew, traveling inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle atop one of the California company’s Falcon 9 rockets, consists of Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who is financing the mission, SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, and pilot Scott Poteet.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the lead spacewalk mission was a “gimmick” in some respects. “But if you look at it as building the capability, independent of NASA, to do spacewalks, that’s potentially important,” he said.

Originally scheduled to launch at the end of August, Polaris Dawn was pushed back first due to technical concerns and weather conditions, and later due to a botched landing of another Falcon 9 rocket, resulting in the Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA) to temporarily ground the Falcon 9 fleet. The crew remained in quarantine for the duration but remained busy with further training.

After launch, the Crew Dragon spacecraft was placed into an orbit that would reach an altitude of 1,400 kilometers above Earth, making it the farthest astronaut to travel from Earth since the Apollo 17 mission to the moon in 1972, and the highest. height attained by a woman. “This is the farthest humans have traveled since the last time humans walked on the moon,” Isaacman said at a prelaunch briefing at the Kennedy Space Center on August 19.

Isaacman, the CEO of US payment firm Shift4, will fly into space in September 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission. That mission, also flown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle, at a cost of up to $200 million, demonstrated SpaceX’s ability to allow the ultrarich to pay for the ultimate thrill, a trip to orbit as a space tourist. (The cost of the Polaris Dawn mission has not yet been revealed.)

Space tourism missions have happened many times, starting in 2001 when US businessman Dennis Tito became the first paying customer aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on the International Space Station (ISS). In the past few years, dozens of paying customers of companies like Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have also taken short suborbital “jumps” into space that last a few minutes.

But Crew Dragon, partially funded by nearly $5 billion in NASA money to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS after the space shuttle’s retirement in 2011, brings a whole new angle to such missions. The vehicle, which is about as spacious as a large car with seating for up to seven passengers, can launch custom flights into Earth orbit, not just the ISS, and enable new types of missions.

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