SpaceX Polaris Dawn to Attempt First All-Civilian Spacewalk
SpaceX is gearing up for a summer launch of its Polaris Dawn 5-day mission manned by an all-civilian crew that will feature 435-mile high spacewalk.
As the first of three planned spaceflights under the Polaris Program, the Dawn will take a private four-person crew led by billionaire Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman on seven elliptical orbits of the Earth.
Mission Commander Isaacman led the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission in September 2021. Isaacman previously owner of the jet pilot training company Draken International, has over 7,000 hours of civilian and military jet flight experience, including piloting a high-speed circumnavigation of the globe.
Mission pilot Scott Poteet is a retired United States Air Force (USAF) Lieutenant Colonel with 3,200 jet-flight hours and over 400 combat flight hours. Poteet served as Draken International’s Director of Business Development and VP of Strategy for Shift4.
Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis is SpaceX’s Lead Space operation Engineer and was responsible for Inspiration4 crew training. Gillis has extensive experience working on SpaceX's Demo-2 and Crew-1 missions, and provides direct support for SpaceX cargo missions for NASA to the International Space Station (ISS).
Mission Specialist Anna Menon SpaceX’s Lead Space Operations Engineer and was formerly space launch Mission Director in the SpaceX control room. Menon was NASA’s biomedical flight controller for ISS Expeditions 47 and 48. According to her
The ISS has been around for 25 years, hosted over 270 astronauts, for up to 371 days. But ISS visitors spent little time outside of the sealed orbiting spacecraft. But some astronauts change into bulbous spacesuits to enter the frozen void of space to perform experiments, and deal with space station assembly and maintenance issues.
A huge limiting factor for space exploration has been the evolution of SpaceX’s Intravehicular Activity (spacewalk) suits that were heavy and bulky. The Polaris Dawn flight will feature astronauts wearing suits capable of both intra and extra vehicular use.
SpaceX will unveil its new EVA suit made with textile-based thermal material that promise to offer maximum mobility and feature a helmet camera, and seals and pressure valves to allow the astronauts to self-regulate their own suit temperature.
Each astronaut’s helmet is 3D-printed to incorporate a new visor that will reduce glare and serve as a heads-up display (HUD) of the astronaut’s spacesuit pressure, temperature, and humidity. The display will also track astronaut exposure to the vacuum of space.
The Polaris Dawn mission is structured to assist SpaceX engineers develop a mass- producible second-generation EVA suit for upcoming missions that are anticipated to eventually ferry millions of American space explorers to colonize the Moon and Mars.