Polaris Dawn is about to make history.
The SpaceX mission, scheduled to launch early Tuesday (Aug. 27), will send another four people into orbit for five days aboard a Crew Dragon capsule. This quartet will be further from Earth than any human being since the Apollo era, and two of them will perform the first spacewalk ever carried out through a personal mission.
Here’s a quick look at what to expect from the epic Polaris Dawn spacewalk, which you can watch live via a SpaceX webcast.
The spacewalk, or extravehicular activity (EVA), will take place on the third day of the mission, Thursday, August 29. SpaceX and the Polaris Dawn team have yet to announce a target time.
Related: SpaceX Polaris Dawn team lands at launch ahead of first personal spacewalk project (photos, video)
The EVA will feature two of the four team members: Commander Jared Isaacman, the billionaire technology entrepreneur who financed and organized Polaris Dawn, and project specialist Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer. But the other two astronauts, project specialist Anna Menon, also SpaceX engineer and pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, will also don their EVA suits. In fact, the Crew Dragon has an airlock, so the inside of the capsule will be exposed to the vacuum of space. .
The EVA operation, from initial ventilation to repressurization of the capsule, will take approximately two hours, Isaacman said at a press conference on Monday, August 19.
The actual part of the spacewalk will account for perhaps a third of that time. Isaacman and Gillis will perform spacewalks sequentially, not together, and each will likely spend between 15 and 20 minutes outside the capsule, according to project team members.
Both team members will be leaving the Crew Dragon entirely, Isaacman said. But don’t expect anything too complicated or dramatic, like Ed White’s iconic spacewalk in June 1965: the first EVA made through an American astronaut, which White walked away from his Gemini capsule in a 7-meter-long spacecraft. )attached.
“The Ed White photo is historic, but I think, as you know, Buzz Aldrin taught us that that wasn’t the right way to do an EVA,” Isaacman said Monday, adding that he and Gillis would try to keep at least one point. . contact with the “mobility aids” designed through SpaceX for the mission.
“We’re just going to float,” he said.
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Isaacman and Gillis will reach a number of milestones during their time away from Crew Dragon.
“It looks like we’re doing a little dance. And we’re really going through a series of verification matrices in the suit,” Isaacman said. “The concept is to tell everything imaginable about the suit and pass it on to engineers to report on long-term advances in suit design. “
In fact, the EVA suits, developed in-house through SpaceX, are not exclusive to Polaris Dawn. The company intends to use them, or future versions of them, for missions in Earth orbit and beyond.
“It’s not lost on us that, you know, there may only be 10 iterations left and a bunch of evolutions from the suit, but that one day we may use an edit that maybe works on Mars,” Isaacman said. Array Array “And it is, once again, a great honour to have the opportunity to check it out on this flight. “
Polaris Dawn is the first of three projects planned under the Polaris program, which Isaacman organizes and funds. If everything goes according to plan, the third Polaris flight will be the first manned Starship project, the large vehicle that SpaceX is preparing for humanity to colonize the Moon and Mars.
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Michael Wall is Senior Space Editor at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but has been known to delve into the realm of space art. His book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in clinical writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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