Update 10:18 pm EDT: SpaceX is giving up launch opportunities on Wednesday and Thursday “due to expected unfavorable weather in the Dragon splashdown areas off the coast of Florida.”
One of the first commercial astronaut missions in history will stay on the ground for at least a couple of days. At the end of Tuesday night, SpaceX hit bad weather around the State of Florida during the period when the Crew Dragon spacecraft would return from its journey into orbit.
“Due to the expected unfavorable weather in the Dragon splashdown areas off the coast of Florida, SpaceX is extending the Falcon 9 launch opportunity of Polaris Dawn on Wednesday, August 28 and Thursday, August 29” , explained the company. “SpaceX teams continue to monitor the weather for favorable launch and return conditions.”
This is the second delay for the five-day free flight mission. The Polaris Dawn mission, led by billionaire-entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, will go further than humans have ventured since the conclusion of the Apollo missions more than 50 years ago. They will also conduct the first commercial spacewalk in history.
SpaceX was originally set to launch the mission Tuesday morning, but chose to delay the mission launch by 24 hours. The missile was lowered to a horizontal position around 5 pm EDT (2100 UTC) on Monday for “additional pre-launch checkouts”.
After 8 pm EDT, the company said: “Teams are taking a closer look at a helium leak on the ground on the Quick Disconnect umbilical. Falcon and Dragon remain healthy and the crew continues to be ready for its multi-day mission to low Earth orbit.”
In a statement on X, first Twitter, Isaacman explained why his launch is so dependent on the weather almost a week from now.
“Our launch criteria are heavily limited by expected splashdown weather conditions. Without an ISS appointment and limited life support consumables, we must be absolutely sure of the reentry weather before launching,” wrote Isaacman. “For now, conditions are not favorable tonight or tomorrow, so we will assess day by day. As Elon said, Polaris Dawn is a challenging mission with critical objectives, so we will wait for the best opportunity to ensure success. Sometimes, the hardest journeys require the most patience, and we are ready to wait for the right moment.
“We know many traveled to see the launch, and we’re grateful for your support. Along with @SpaceX, we’ll do our best to keep you informed.”
Isaacman is joined on the flight by Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet; Mission Specialist and Medical Officer Anna Menon; and Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis. Menon and Gillis will become the first SpaceX employees to travel in space.
When possible, a Falcon 9 rocket supporting this mission will lift off from Launch Complex 39A. Spaceflight Now will have live coverage of the mission beginning approximately 4 hours before liftoff.
Menon, who journals often, said she looks forward to continuing this journey for more than her own memories.
“I try to capture a number of things. Especially when we approach the flight, this has been really evident, time is fast, it flies and our days are full of actions that lead to the mission, but especially that lead at launch,” Menon told Spaceflight Now in July. “I’m trying to get the details down because I know I’m going to look back one day and it’s going to be pretty blurry, I suspect. I’m trying to get the details down so that one day I can get my mind back and remember all the nuances of this experience.”
“But then I also try to capture my feelings and experiences that I feel with my crewmates and this amazing team at SpaceX so that I can not only convey in the technical details, but also the emotions of going through this.”
Polaris Dawn will be the second time Isaacman has traveled to space and the second time the Shift4 Payments CEO has served as a mission commander aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft. Isaacman will also become the second person to fly aboard a Dragon twice, following Axiom Space astronaut Michael López-Alegría’s second flight on Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) earlier this year.
“It takes a huge team effort to bring a mission like Polaris Dawn to life. Together, we’re making incredible progress for the future, both in space and here on Earth,” Isaacman wrote in a post of social media following the conclusion of the mission readiness review on Monday morning. “We can do both.”
It takes a huge team effort to bring a mission like Polaris Dawn to life. Together, we are making incredible progress for the future, both in space and here on Earth.
We can do both. https://t.co/iOuBuTFJHG
– Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) August 26, 2024
The Falcon 9 rocket supporting the mission, tail number B1083 in the SpaceX fleet, will launch for a fourth time on this flight. It previously supported the Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station as well as sending two batches of SpaceX Starlink Internet satellites into low Earth orbit.
With the Crew Dragon spacecraft stacked on top, the launch vehicle is 65 m (213.3 ft) tall. Named “Resilience,” the Dragon will make its third trip into space after launching the Crew-1 and Inspiration4 missions, Isaacman’s first trip beyond Earth.
Because Resilience will be launched into a 190 x 1,200 km (118 x 746 mi.) orbit at an inclination of 51.6 degrees, B1083 will land on SpaceX’s drone, “A Shortfall of Gravitas,” about 9.5 minutes later at the liftoff.
“The @PolarisProgram mission readiness review has just finished and we are currently headed for launch in just over 24 hours,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote in a social media post. “The safety of the crew is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual as it will be the furthest humans have been from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spacewalk!”
“If there are concerns, the launch will be postponed until these concerns are addressed.”
U @Program Polaris The mission preparation review has just finished and we are currently heading for launch in just over 24 hours.
The safety of the crew is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual, as it will be the furthest humans have been from Earth since Apollo and the… https://t.co/4TEwupwldQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2024
Record distance
During the first day of the flight, the rocket will raise its apogee – the highest point of the orbit – to 1,400 km (870 mi.). At that distance, the Polaris Dawn crew will have flown farther from Earth than any human since the end of the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
“When you go into this environment, you’re dealing with totally different realities than, say, when you go to the space station,” Isaacman said in a prelaunch briefing. “It’s a lot of energy going into the vehicle, it’s a lot of energy to get out of the vehicle when you’re at home. It’s a different radiation environment. It’s a different micrometeorite orbital debris environment.
“So, we’re going to learn a little bit from this in terms of human health, science and research. If we get to Mars one day, we’d like to be able to come back and be healthy enough to tell people.”
The distance will also give Gillis and Menon the distinction of the women who have traveled the farthest from Earth to date. NASA astronaut Christina Koch will break that record when the Artemis 2 mission launches for a trip around the Moon no earlier than September 2025.
Gillis joined SpaceX as it refined its human spaceflight program leading up to the Demo-2 mission in May 2020, crewed by former NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley. She said being a part of the mission to prepare Dragon to withstand the impacts of the Van Allen Radiation Belts and for the first commercial spacewalk was a great, full-circle moment.
“And so it’s been so cool over the last couple of years to almost start this process again, as a different, different development program where we’re adding a whole nitrogen suppression system to the spacecraft. We’re going to make sure that we they are the appropriate mobility aids to support a crew member performing the EVA,” said Gillis. “It’s been really, really cool and really special for me, given my background on why the Dragon is the way it is, but now I get to actually help develop a new spacesuit and test how it integrates into the spaceship and how it can indeed.support a space walk.
“So it’s been something that’s really, really cool for me to be involved in the last couple of years.”
Spacewalk on Skywalker
The highlight of the mission for many people, both at SpaceX and in the Polaris program and beyond, will be the spacewalk that happens on the third day of flight.
Because the Crew Dragon does not have an airlock, the entire vehicle will be vacuumed up during the spacewalk. Isaacman and Walker physically exit the Dragon capsule, one at a time, with the support of a hand and foot-rail system, called “Skywalker”.
The homage to the “Star Wars” franchise follows the name of the rocket itself, the Falcon 9, which is a tip of the hat to the Millennium Falcon, seen in all the films.
Most of the training over the last two and a half years has been working on prebreathe protocols to purge nitrogen from their systems. The process will begin about an hour after they arrive in orbit and continue slowly more than a couple of days before the day of the flight three rolls around.
“This pre-breather is really designed to help mitigate the risk of decompression sickness when we actually go to vacuum in the spacesuits,” Gillis said. “Over the course of about 45 hours, we will actually slowly lower the cabin pressure and increase the oxygen concentration to help mitigate the risk.”
The entire spacewalk will last about two hours and SpaceX plans to live stream the event using the various cameras located around the Dragon spacecraft. Speaking as someone who trains astronauts to work with the capsule and spacesuits, Gillis said she’s eager to try the field herself in orbit.
“I think the most interesting thing is what is really like this in space? It’s end to end. You know, we started from the design concept until the experiment actually in orbit. And so I’m really, really interested to see what we learn from doing the EVA, what ways we need to modify our training for future spacewalks,” said Gillis. “But it should be really interesting to see this complete design evolution come together.”
Poteet said the training he and his crewmates have experienced from the SpaceX teams gives them great confidence in the mission ahead.
“Spending thousands of hours in the simulator is what helped build our confidence to deal with any scenario that Melissa decided to throw at us,” said Poteet, referring to one of the SpaceX trainers. “It was very challenging … but experiencing those and trying to identify what’s wrong and then how to work together to solve those problems certainly built our confidence to be able to handle those very low probability (scenarios) in orbit.”