Polaris Dawn Mission lifted off on September 10 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, sending four people to orbit for a roughly five-day stay aboard the Crew Dragon capsule “Resilience.”
Key points
- Polaris Dawn is the first of three testing and development missions under the Polaris Program, which will be jointly executed by Isaacman and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
- The Polaris Dawn mission aims to make exploration history, conducting the first-ever private spacewalk.
- Resilience, will go into an orbit that will eventually take them up to 1,400km above the planet. No human has been that far since Nasa’s Apollo programme ended in the 1970s.
- The astronauts will pass through a region of space known as the Van Allen belt, which has high levels of radiation, but the crew will be protected by the spacecraft and their newly upgraded spacesuits.
- Polaris Dawn is carrying 36 different experiments from 31 institutions — including a number that will gather data for NASA’s Human Research Program.
- The NASA-affiliated experiments are designed to help agency scientists better understand spaceflight’s impacts on the human body.
About Spacewalk
- A spacewalk or an extravehicular activity (EVA) is a period of activity spent outside a spacecraft by an astronaut in space.
- The first-ever spacewalk was carried out on March 18, 1965, by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. Leonov’s walk lasted 10 minutes.
- Today, spacewalks are usually done outside the International Space Station (ISS) and can last between five and eight hours.
