Polaris Dawn is ready to make history.
The SpaceX mission, scheduled to launch Tuesday morning (Aug. 27), will carry four people into orbit for five days aboard a Crew Dragon capsule. This quartet will travel farther from Earth than any human has since the Apollo era – and two of them will conduct the first spacewalk ever performed by a private mission.
Here’s a quick look at what to expect during the epic Polaris Dawn spacewalk, which you can watch live via a SpaceX webcast.
Mission Day 3
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 not yet announced a target date.
Related: SpaceX Polaris Dawn crew lands at launch site ahead of first private spacewalk mission (photos, video)
Two of the four crew members will participate in the EVA – Commander Jared Isaacman, the billionaire tech entrepreneur who funded and organized Polaris Dawn, and Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis, an engineer at SpaceX. But the other two astronauts – Mission Specialist Anna Menon, also a SpaceX engineer, and Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel – will also don their EVA suits. That’s because the Crew Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, so the interior of the capsule is exposed to the vacuum of space.
The entire EVA process – from the initial venting to the repressurization of the capsule – will take about two hours, Isaacman said during a press conference on Monday (August 19).
The actual spacewalk will take about a third of that time. Isaacman and Gillis will walk one at a time, not together, and each of them will likely spend 15 to 20 minutes outside the capsule, mission team members said.
Both crew members will fully egress the Crew Dragon, Isaacman said. But don’t expect anything too fancy or dramatic like Ed White’s legendary spacewalk in June 1965 – the first EVA by an American astronaut, in which White dangled from a 25-foot tether far from his Gemini capsule.
“The photo of Ed White is historic, but I think, as you know, Buzz Aldrin taught us that that is not the right way to do an EVA,” Isaacman said Monday, adding that he and Gillis would always try to maintain at least one point of contact with the “mobility aids” SpaceX designed for the mission.
“We’re not just going to hang around,” he said.
Test, test
Isaacman and Gillis will achieve a number of milestones during their time away from Crew Dragon.
“It will look like we’re doing a little bit of dancing. And that is, we’re going through a series of test matrices on the suit,” Isaacman said. “The idea is to learn as much as we can about the suit and feed it back to the engineers to influence future suit design developments.”
In fact, SpaceX’s proprietary EVA suits are not a one-off for Polaris Dawn. The company intends to use them – or future versions of them – on a variety of missions in Earth orbit and beyond.
“We realize that it could be in 10 versions and a number of evolutions of the suit, but that one day someone could wear a version of it that could walk on Mars,” Isaacman said. “And it’s a great honor, again, to have the opportunity to test it on this flight.”
Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned missions in the Polaris program, which Isaacman is organizing and funding. If all goes according to plan, the third Polaris flight will be the first manned mission of Starship, the massive vehicle SpaceX is developing to help humanity colonize the Moon and Mars.
