Polaris Dawn Crew Reaches New Heights in Space Exploration!

After lift off, the crew of Polaris Dawn flew to the highest Earth orbit ever flown since the Gemini 11 mission, over 50 years ago. The crew lifted off atop a Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday morning from Kennedy Space Center Complex 39A aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience. The flight was the 14th crewed orbital mission of a Crew Dragon Spacecraft. Crew Dragon spacecraft transport crews to and from the International Space Station under NASA's Commercial Crew Program, and are used for commercial flights to the ISS and for other missions, such as the current Polaris Dawn mission. Early Wednesday morning the crew had reached an altitude of 1,400 kilometers above the Earth.

Polaris Dawn

No earlier than summer 2024, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Polaris Dawn mission from Florida. Dragon and the Polaris Dawn crew will spend up to five days in orbit.

Polaris Program

The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three trips that Jared Isaacman has bought from SpaceX, and it will embark on some exciting ventures and firsts. Isaacman, CEO of Shift4 Payments, had previously led the first all civilian mission to orbit, Inspiration 4, aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience in 2021. That mission raised hundreds of millions of dollars for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. The Polaris Dawn mission continues to raise funds for St. Jude and its children's cancer research. And it is supporting other causes back on Earth. On Wednesday, the 23rd anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror attack, the crew took the time to speak with families of the Folds of Honor from space. Folds of Honor is an organization providing  educational scholarships to spouses and children of America's fallen and disabled military service-members and first responders. You can watch this very moving event on X @PolarisProgram.

The Polaris Dawn mission will last five days, and the crew has already made some remarkable achievements. These achievements and the success of the mission can be attributed to the extensive training and preparation the crew underwent prior to their journey into space, and the new SpaceX extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits.

The new EVA suit is designed to allow astronauts to go outside their spacecraft. SpaceX developed its first intravehicular activity (IVA) space suit in 2015. The IVA suit was designed  by Jose Fenandez, a costume designer, along with Elon Musk. The suit was first worn by a mannequin during the maiden launch of the Falcon Heavy in 2018. The SpaceX spacesuits are custom made for each crew member.

In designing the EVA space suit SpaceX looked at what was needed to improve the IVA suit and make one suitable for a spacewalk. The first challenge they had to address was mobility in the suit. The suit designers had to make it easier for the crew to get outside of the Dragon spacecraft for the spacewalk. The designers made the suits more flexible. The new suits have enhanced movability while the suit is pressurized. They integrated flexure joints to allow easy bending at the elbows and the knees. The EVA suit moves the zipper system from the inseam to the waist.

The EVA suit was built and designed in Hawthorne, California, SpaceX factory. The suit is built of fabric plus a Faraday layer that shields the suit from external electric fields. The helmet for the suit is a new single pane visor helmet. The visor is made of polycarbonate, copper, and ITO or Indium Tin Oxide. "The two coatings together reflect the sun away from the crew, as well as reflecting infrared heat back to the crew when they are facing deep space," according to a SpaceX principal spacesuit engineer Erik Kraus. The new EVA space suits worked phenomenally on Thursday morning September 12th, as crew members Jared Issacman and Sarah Gillis successfully completed the first private/commercial crew EVA . The astronauts performed what is known as a Standup EVA, or SEVA. This was the 20th such EVA conducted in history. Jared Issacman became the first private astronaut to stand up outside a spacecraft hatch. The view taken from the camera inside the helmet of Issacman was just breathtaking. Many tests were performed by the crew.

SpaceX has been working on perfecting the design of their spacesuits for quite some time. The suits used for the EVA were a great improvement to the first IVA spacesuits with many new spectacular features designed into the suit for the EVA. In 2018 NASA Commercial Crew astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, tested the SpaceX IVA spacesuit inside the Dragon 2 spacecraft and wore it in the Crew Dragon Demo-2 flight launched on the 30th of May, 2020.  This was the first NASA crewed mission since the end of the shuttle program. That mission took place during the Presidency of Donald Trump, as he set the nation on the course to greatness—calling for returning American Astronauts to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years via his Artemis Project. The SpaceX launch of the Demo-2 crew to the ISS was the beginning of an important relationship between the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. That relationship has grown stronger and stronger to date.

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Promethean ActionMichael James Carr

SpaceX continues to be the leader in transporting crews to the International Space Station, and soon to the Axiom Space Station, and will be the leader in taking humans back to the Moon and on to Mars. Polaris Dawn has set the stage to take humans further and further into space as they prepare the way for the Artemis missions to the Moon. Industrialization of the Moon and permanent human operations there will provide many of the resources required as we move to colonize Mars.