U.S. billionaire Jared Isaacman, who chartered the first universal orbital spaceflight, announced on Monday that he is teaming up with SpaceX on three other private missions — including spacewalks that will fly in the next generation It culminates in the first manned flight of the Starship rocket.
The first, called Polaris Dawn, will take place no earlier than the fourth quarter of this year and will be led by Isaacman, founder of payment processing company Shift4.
The program represents a new step in commercial spaceflight as Elon Musk’s SpaceX seeks to take on more ambitious missions that have always been the domain of the national space agency.
During the press conference, Isaacman announced that he and SpaceX are co-funding Project Polaris, named after Polaris. He declined to provide further details, such as the total cost or the percentage the parties would contribute.
However, it is widely expected to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
“This program is specifically designed to increase the possibility of long-term space travel … and lead us toward our ultimate goal of advancing Mars exploration,” Isaacman told reporters.
A seasoned pilot, he led the Inspiration4 mission last year, a three-day orbital mission with a four civilian crew aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that raised $240 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
For Polaris Dawn, the crew will go deeper into space than any previous dragon has flown — an altitude Isaacman says will be similar to NASA’s Gemini project, the agency’s second crewed spaceflight program in the 1960s.
Gemini 11 flew about 850 miles (1,370 kilometers), deeper into space than the most recent mission on the 250-mile International Space Station.
But the Apollo-era journey to the moon is still a long way off, and the moon is roughly 239,000 miles — or 30 Earths in a row — far apart.
The Polaris Dawn crew will also conduct the first commercial spacewalk, which will require a new yet-to-be-developed outer vehicle spacesuit.
Since the dragon has no airlock, opening the hatch would expose the entire spacecraft to the vacuum of space.
Mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon said the crew would “make sure everything is well protected before we open the hatch.”
The spacecraft will launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket and will remain in orbit for up to five days.
The crew’s expected altitude will lead them into the interior of the Van Allen Belt, an area of dangerous radiation that protects Earth from the solar wind.
The Dragon’s fuselage and new spacesuit will help protect the crew, who will measure radiation exposure throughout the flight, added former NASA employee Menon, whose husband is named Anil Menon, His husband is the latest addition to NASA’s astronaut candidates.
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