The launch of a private space mission Polaris Dawn will not take place before August 26. This is stated in the message published in its official account in the social network X.
Polaris Dawn mission objectives
The Polaris Dawn mission is funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, who has already flown into space in 2021. It should be the first of three flights under the Polaris program. As part of the program, Crew Dragon, carrying four people, will make a solo flight to Earth orbit.
The upcoming flight has three main objectives. First, Crew Dragon will have to enter orbit with an apogee of 1400 km and break the altitude record set back in 1966 by the Gemini 11 mission. Then it reached an altitude of 1,372 kilometers (the Apollo missions traveled much greater distances from the Earth, but they did so on missions to the Moon, not in Earth orbit).
Second, dozens of scientific experiments will be conducted during the flight. Since Crew Dragon’s apogee orbit will be close to Earth’s inner radiation belt, the goal of many will be to study the effects of increased radiation levels on astronauts’ health.
Finally, the Polaris Dawn mission will feature the first-ever private spacewalk. Isaacman will be in attendance, as well as mission specialist Sarah Gillis. The operation will take place at an altitude of 500 kilometers, which is comparable to the Hubble telescope’s orbital altitude. Since Crew Dragon doesn’t have a separate airlock, the astronauts will have to depressurize the entire spacecraft to get into space.
New flight date for the Polaris Dawn mission
Polaris Dawn’s flight date has already been postponed several times since its announcement in 2022. At first, it was supposed to go into space as early as the end of 2022. Then the flight was moved to 2023. Then 2024. The postponement of the mission was due to its technical complexity and the need for creating new spacesuits, which proved to be more challenging than originally thought.
By the summer of 2024, the problems with spacesuits had finally been solved. In June, the Polaris Dawn crew tested them in a vacuum chamber to see how the suits would behave in space-like conditions. The tests were successful.
However, even after that, the mission again faced postponements. First, the Falcon 9 rocket launch ended in an accident. This resulted in the flight date having to be shifted by a month.
We are targeting no earlier than August 26 for the launch of Polaris Dawn pic.twitter.com/tkkiRke64a
— Polaris (@PolarisProgram) August 7, 2024
Now the mission has become hostage to the Starliner situation. NASA recently announced its intention to postpone the launch of the Crew-9 mission, taking a higher priority for SpaceX. In this situation, Polaris Dawn once again had to be moved up to give SpaceX time to prepare. Now it is reported that the mission will go into space no earlier than August 26. But it is possible that this is not the last postponement. It is quite possible that SpaceX will still send the Crew-9 into space first, after which it will take care of Polaris Dawn.
