The four crew members will spend up to five days in orbit around the Earth, and on the third day there will be a two-member exit to open space. During this walk, the entire spacecraft will be depressurized for approximately two hours. The remaining two crew members on board will also have to wear spacesuits.
It differs from other modern exits into open space in that it usually includes a airlock that seals off the interior of the spacecraft from the vacuum of space. The Crew Dragon capsule used for this mission has no airlock, making it similar to the days of early spaceflight in the 1960s and 1970s. Additionally, all previous spacewalks have been conducted by professional astronauts trained by governments, while Polaris Dawn is crewed by private civilians.
Adding to the risk are the fact that the spacesuits are of new design (albeit thoroughly tested on Earth) and that the flight will travel further from Earth than any human has traveled since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
The flight commander is Jared Isaacman, head of SpaceX’s Polaris program and one of its billionaire financiers. The rest of the crew consists of retired US Air Force test pilot Scott Poteet and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.
Crew Dragon’s special in-flight capsule is called Resilience, and it will be launched aboard the Falcon 9 rocket on its third trip to space. The reusable Falcon 9 first stage has returned to Earth and landed aboard SpaceX’s Just Read The Instructions drone in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsules are also used to transport astronauts and supplies to and from the International Space Station, and one of them will be launched in 2025. will fly back to Earth stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who had problems with the Boeing Starliner that launched them, writes New Scientist.
2024-09-10 14:06:32