SpaceX delays launch of Polaris Dawn private spacewalk mission to Aug. 27

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SpaceX's private Polaris Dawn mission will wait one more day for launch.

a white cone-shaped capsule on a truck bed in front of a large hangar with a logo reading "spacex" on it
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for the private Polaris Dawn mission arrives at its rocket hangar. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Update for 11 p.m. ET on Aug. 27: SpaceX has now delayed the Polaris Dawn launch until no earlier than Aug. 30 due to a helium leak and bad weather. Read our delay stories here and here.

The crew for SpaceX's next astronaut mission will wait one extra day before launching to space.

SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission — the first in history to feature a private spacewalk —was slated for Monday, Aug. 26, but will now launch no earlier than Tuesday, Aug. 27. The shift comes two days after the Polaris Dawn crew arrived in Florida for the final leg of their pre-mission preparations. 

The delay was announced Wednesday night (Aug. 21), in a post by SpaceX on X, formerly twitter, accompanied by a a mission preview video highlighting the crew, modified Dragon spacecraft, and SpaceX's new extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits.

"The new date allows additional time for teams to complete preflight checkouts ahead of next week’s launch," SpaceX wrote in a follow-up post, specifying the reason for the 24-hour schedule change. 

The mission will lift-off from Launch Complex-39A, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Polaris Dawn's four-hour launch window opens Tuesday morning (Aug. 27) at 3:38 a.m. EDT (0738 GMT), and will kickoff a five-day mission that will include the first-ever spacewalk conducted by private astronauts.

Polaris Dawn is funded by U.S. billionaire philanthropist Jared Isaacman, who is serving as mission commander. Dawn will be the second crewed mission payed for by Isaacman, and his second trip to space. His first mission, Inspiration4, launched the first all-civilian in 2021, and helped raise $250 million in donations for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Dawn serves as the first of three planned launches for Isaacman's Polaris Program, all of which aim to further the private exploration of space and expand the scientific research of life in microgravity, as well as continuing to raise money for Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital. For this mission, Isaacman is joined by retired United States Air Force (USAF) Lieutenant Colonel Scott "Kidd" Poteet, serving as mission pilot, as well as mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. Gillis and Menon both work as Lead Space Operations Engineers at SpaceX, and will be the first of the company's employees to launch to space.

Polaris Dawn crewmembers Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis.  (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner)

The crew will launch into a highly eliptical orbit, and quickly raise their altitude to about 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), where they will complete a number of science experiements. At this distance, the Polaris Dawn crew will be farther from Earth than anyone has flown since the Apollo missions ended in 1972 — making Menon and Gillis the first women in history to fly so far.

The Polaris Dawn crew will also undertake another historic first: the first all-civilian spacewalk. Dawn was originally slated to launch in 2022, but was repeatedly delayed as SpaceX developed and tested its new EVA suit and modified the interior of the mission's Dragon capsule for exposure to the vacuum of space.

Related: Billionaire's Polaris Dawn crew arrives at SpaceX launch site for 1st-ever private spacewalk flight (photos, video)

SpaceX's EVA suit. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Testing SpaceX's EVA suit is Polaris Dawn's most critical experiement, and will take place on the third day of the mission. Visually, the spacesuit appears similar to SpaceX's IVA (intravehicular activity) suits, which are worn only inside the spacecraft. Opening Dragon's hatch to expose the cabin and its occupants to the harsh environment of space meant redesigning the spacecraft's interior and upgrading the spacesuits with an enhanced thermal management system that uses additional insulative materials, as well as a new coating on the visor of the suit's helmet.

The SpaceX spacewalking suit developed for Polaris Dawn, shown inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. (Image credit: SpaceX)
RELATED STORIES:

— How SpaceX's private Polaris Dawn astronauts will attempt the 1st-ever 'all-civilian' spacewalk

— How SpaceX modified a Dragon crew capsule for Polaris Dawn's historic private spacewalk

— Inspiration4: How Jared Isaacman's kindergarten space dream became a pioneering SpaceX mission

In total, the spacewalk is scheduled to last two hours, from cabin depressurization through repressurization, with two of the Polaris Dawn crew exiting the spacecraft entirely. The mission will wrap up two days later, with a parachute splashdown in one of a handful of potential landing zones off the coast of Florida.

The next two launches in the Polaris manifest have yet to coalesce any tangible mission goals or framework. However, Isaacman has voiced interest in providing maintenance or support for some of NASA's legacy missions already in orbit such as the Hubble Space Telescope, and has stated his intent for the third Polaris mission to be the first crewed launch of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft.

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Josh Dinner
Josh Dinner
Writer, Content Manager

Josh Dinner is Space.com's Content Manager. He is a writer and photographer with a passion for science and space exploration, and has been working the space beat since 2016. Josh has covered the evolution of NASA's commercial spaceflight partnerships, from early Dragon and Cygnus cargo missions to the ongoing development and launches of crewed missions from the Space Coast, as well as NASA science missions and more. He also enjoys building 1:144 scale models of rockets and human-flown spacecraft. Find some of Josh's launch photography on Instagram and his website, and follow him on Twitter, where he mostly posts in haiku.

7 Comments Comment from the forums
  • PawAngel
    Godspeed. A question for everyone: Could a Dragon Capsul, powered by a Falcon 9, make a loop trip around the moon and back? Or would we need a Falcon Heavy? Bonus: If Jared Isaacman wanted to finance this, would NASA let him do it?
    Reply
  • 24launch
    This was actually discussed at length a while back in another space forum. The concensus (mostly) was that a Falcon Heavy could do it - factoring in the additional weight of the additional food, water, O2, CO2 scrubbers and other consumables required for a multi-day mission.

    But there are lots of other considerations not the least of which is the heat shield. Re-entering from Earth orbit, Dragon is doing around 17.5K miles per hour. But a return trajectory from the Moon it would be going around 25K miles per hour. That's a LOT more speed to have to scrub off during re-entry thus a LOT more heating and ablation. Elon had said a while back the heat shields on Dragon were tested at significantly higher heating and stresses than normal Earth orbit re-entry (so they had established a large safety margin) and that it should probably be fine for a lunar re-entry. But probably and definitely are certainly not synonmous when lives are on the line!

    Other issues would be communications. Communicating with a ground station in 220 mile orbit vs 228,000 miles is a massive amount of signal to noise loss. One of the cool experiments with Polaris Dawn is using laser communications, so that would allow a much tighter beam from Lunar Orbit, and with Starlink blanking Earth orbit, you wouldn't have to be trying to hit a ground station that's not directly in your line-of-sight.

    If you remember a while back there was the Dear Moon mission to be financed by the Japanese billionaire with an orbit around the Moon in a yet to be designed Dragon capsule. Unfortunately in the time since it was proposed he lost 1/2 his fortune and canceled the deal.

    While such a mission around the moon would most likely be done with NASA's cooperation and no doubt tapping into their expertise, really the sole approving government body would be the FAA in granting not only the launch license but the very importaint return/reenter license!
    Reply
  • PawAngel
    Thanks for the quick reply. So what we need is for Elon to send an empty Dragon to see how well the heat shield holds up. One thing about this is that Dragon might could be used as a rescue ship for Artemis. He can pop up a Falcon within days if not hours if one were ready to go. Apollo 13 got very lucky.
    Reply
  • jordiheguilor
    On another article I read about the electronics and the radiation in the Van Allen inner belt:

    "To make sure the spacecraft’s avionics — or electronics used for navigation and communication — could survive the heavy radiation environment encountered during the Polaris Dawn mission, engineers “literally strapped a lot of the avionics to a gurney and brought it to an oncology lab,” Isaacman said."

    I wouldn't want to be subject to the amount of radiation that can fry electronics. It doesn't seem a healthy thing to do in the long term.
    Reply
  • Unclear Engineer
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt :
    "The total radiation received by the astronauts varied from mission-to-mission but was measured to be between 0.16 and 1.14 rads (1.6 and 11.4 mGy), much less than the standard of 5 rem (50 mSv) per year set by the United States Atomic Energy Commission for people who work with radioactivity."

    Of course, that was with the shielding provided by the Apollo capsule. Probably not as much shielding in the Dragon capsule structure.
    Reply
  • jordiheguilor
    Unclear Engineer said:
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt :
    "The total radiation received by the astronauts varied from mission-to-mission but was measured to be between 0.16 and 1.14 rads (1.6 and 11.4 mGy), much less than the standard of 5 rem (50 mSv) per year set by the United States Atomic Energy Commission for people who work with radioactivity."

    Of course, that was with the shielding provided by the Apollo capsule. Probably not as much shielding in the Dragon capsule structure.
    But aren't these astronauts going to spend two or three days in the Van Allen belts, while the Apollo astronauts just crossed them?
    Reply
  • Unclear Engineer
    My comment was directed at post #3 about sending a Dragon capsule to loop around the Moon.

    From the link I provided:

    "The inner Van Allen Belt extends typically from an altitude of 0.2 to 2 Earth radii (L values of 1.2 to 3) or 1,000 km (620 mi) to 12,000 km (7,500 mi) above the Earth. In certain cases, when solar activity is stronger or in geographical areas such as the South Atlantic Anomaly, the inner boundary may decline to roughly 200 km"

    For the Polaris Dawn mission orbit, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris_Dawn . It says:
    "The Dragon capsule will initially be inserted into a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee that will take them up to 1,200 kilometers (750 mi) away from Earth and a perigee that will take the crew through the South Atlantic Anomaly at an altitude of 190 kilometers (120 mi). The crew expects that making just two or three passes of the anomaly at that altitude will expose them to the equivalent radiation load of three months on the International Space Station so that they may conduct experiments to study the health effects of space radiation and spaceflight on the human body. During this time, the crew will also do extensive checks of the Dragon capsule. If no faults are found, they will fire thrusters to will take them up to 1,400 kilometers (870 mi) away from Earth."

    For ISS astronauts, measurements from the crew's personal dosimeters indicate a range from 12 to 28.8 milli rads per day. So, 1.1 to 2.6 rads in 3 months.

    Note that the "South Atlantic Anomaly" is a magnetic "north pole" located about 25 degrees south of the equator. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly .
    Reply