It was a big deal when astronauts Pete Conrad and Dock Gordon flew their Gemini XI spacecraft to an unprecedented altitude of 850 miles on Sept. 14, 1966. It’s still a big deal 58 years later, because that record for a manned spacecraft in Earth orbit still stands. But that will change later this month, when crew members of the Polaris Dawn mission — scheduled to launch Aug. 26 — fire their engines and climb to a new record altitude of 870 miles, traveling farther from home than astronauts on a non-lunar mission have ever traveled.
The Polaris Dawn crew will have other accomplishments to boast of: She will be the first commercial astronaut to conduct an extravehicular activity (EVA, also known as a spacewalk) and the first to test communications between a spacecraft and the satellites of the SpaceX Starlink system. She will also conduct a series of more than 40 scientific experiments, test the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft at altitudes that will take it through the Van Allen radiation belts and conduct more than a dozen experiments on the crew members themselves, including studying measures to combat the persistent problem of space sickness, which 60% to 80% of all astronauts suffer during their first two or three days away from Earth. In addition, she hopes to raise tens of millions of dollars for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
The mission is funded by Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder and CEO of Shift4, an internet payments company. It will be Isaacman’s second flight into space, following the all-civilian Inspiration4 mission in September 2021. That trip also raised a lot of money for St. Jude, Isaacman’s favorite charity, and it was the first time an all-civilian crew had traveled into space. On both missions, Isaacman was effectively a paying customer of SpaceX, purchasing seats aboard the Dragon for a reported $50 million apiece. Polaris Dawn has a larger mission, launching the first of three flights in the Polaris series that would allow private crews to perform maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope and also fly aboard the maiden mission of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket.
“We named the Polaris program after our North Star,” says Isaacman, “which is actually a constellation of three stars, and Polaris is intended to consist of three missions.”
Isaacman could be on all Polaris flights, which Inspiration4 says will give him a total of four trips to space, making him one of the most experienced astronauts in the world — despite never being part of NASA or any other government space program. His crew the first time was notable because it included Hayley Arceneaux, then 29, a physician assistant at St. Jude who had been treated for bone cancer there as a child and was the first person to fly into space with a prosthetic — a rod in place of her left thigh. This time, the crew includes pilot Scott Poteet, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and vice president of strategy at Shift4; mission specialist Sarah Gillis, a senior aerospace engineer at SpaceX; and mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon, another senior aerospace engineer at SpaceX.
Of all the contributions the Polaris series could make to science, the ability to service Hubble and raise its altitude to a higher, longer-lasting orbit is perhaps the greatest. Hubble has been aloft since 1990, and in the decades since has established itself as one of the most important cosmic observatories ever built. Five servicing missions conducted by space shuttle crews helped extend its useful life, but since the shuttles were retired in 2011, the telescope has always been just one glitch away from going offline for good. A new servicing mission by a new crew could keep it operating for years to come.
“There was a study done jointly with SpaceX, Polaris and NASA that looked at the feasibility of accelerating Hubble,” says Isaacman. “In my opinion, the risk-reward ratio is pretty simple.”
Starship’s maiden flight – scheduled for its third mission – would also be no small feat. The spacecraft has been selected by NASA as the human landing system – the lunar module for the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon before the end of this decade. Only a handful of NASA greats have led the first missions in a new spacecraft – Alan Shepard in Mercury, Gus Grissom in Gemini, Wally Schirra in Apollo and John Young in the shuttles. Whoever pilots Starship on its first Earth-orbiting mission will be in select company.
However, Polaris Dawn will be the first of the Polaris series of spacecraft and will have a wide range of tasks to perform. Conducting medical tests – including tilting the head while rotating in the spacecraft – to study the persistent problem of space sickness could go a long way toward making space living and colonization more practical. Astronauts have suffered from motion sickness since the first space flights, and no one has yet found a good solution beyond administering antiemetics and other medications.
“SpaceX’s grand vision of sending hundreds of thousands of people into space cannot be achieved if half of them are throwing up, because the other half are throwing up too,” says Isaacman. “That is certainly something that has to be overcome for a species that evolved in 1g, normal gravity.”
The Polaris Dawn crew will also be the first to try out a new, more robust spacesuit design. It will protect astronauts not only in a spacecraft at normal pressure, but also in the vacuum and extreme temperatures experienced during EVAs and on the lunar surface. Like the old Apollo lunar suits, the new ones are robust and allow for outdoor mobility – but unlike the old suits, they are also comfortable.
“You have to remember that you often put hard connections in the suit,” says Menon. “When you’re in a seat and you’re strapped in, you can actually hurt the person in the seat. So SpaceX developed this really novel connection design that, when the suit is depressurized, actually becomes a soft connection. During the EVA, Sarah and Jared will collect great data on the suit’s performance.”
The Starlink work could also be groundbreaking. More than 6,200 Starlink satellites are currently in orbit, and as many as 42,000 could eventually be operational. The system, which has been used primarily by Ukraine and Russia in their ongoing war, provides broadband services from sky to Earth, but has not yet been used between two spacecraft. Polaris Dawn will conduct a proof-of-concept experiment to prove it can be done.
“We’re adding a laser to the hull of Dragon,” Gillis says. “To communicate with the spacecraft and send internet data, there’s a laser relaying information (from Starlink) and another laser constantly sending information to this moving constellation. That’s an incredible amount of bandwidth availability.”
Life aboard Dragon during the five-day Polaris Dawn mission will be relatively comfortable. The four-person spacecraft has a habitable volume of 328 cubic feet, slightly more space per person than the three-person Apollo spacecraft’s 210 cubic feet. In orbit, that volume is even larger, as a weightless crew can use overhead and bulkhead space not available in 1g.
The food for the crew will also be better and fresher than the usual astronaut food – at least for the first two and a half days. “Fresh food options include small sandwiches, pizza slices and empanadas, before moving on to Clif Bars, beef jerky and the like,” Poteet says. The crew will also get cold brew coffee, which serves a dual purpose: It will be frozen in bags designed to keep the fresh food cool, and will be drinkable once the bags thaw.
An Earth audience will be able to follow the mission live, with launch, EVA, splashdown and other segments broadcast live. Menon, who is the mother of two young children, is co-author of a children’s book entitled Kisses from spaceabout a cosmic dragon and his earthly babies, which she will read from orbit. Copies of the book will be sold on the Polaris Dawn website and the book she takes into orbit will be auctioned off, with all proceeds going to St. Jude.
There could also be music from space. During Inspiration4, crew member Chris Sembroski played the ukulele for viewers at home. Gillis from Polaris Dawn is a classically trained violinist and could take her instrument with her into space. “I’ll keep some secrets to myself,” she says, laughing.
Menon and the other crew members are not taking their mission lightly, of course. The trip will require them to lift off on a 23-story-tall Falcon 9 rocket with 1,700 pounds of thrust and fly around the world in a 13,000-pound Dragon at 17,000 miles per hour – or 4.9 miles per second. With that much thrust, weight and speed, a lot can go wrong. The men and women who fly the Polaris missions know they are trying their luck – luck in the interest of a great adventure, yes, but also in the interest of sound science.
