Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program. (File)
United States:
SpaceX has again postponed its attempt to launch a bold orbital mission with an all-civilian crew that aimed to be the first spacewalk by private citizens.
The Polaris Dawn mission, organized by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, was scheduled to launch four hours from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday morning.
But SpaceX announced in a message on X late Tuesday night that it was postponing the launch plans because of adverse weather forecasts in Dragon's splashdown areas off the coast of Florida.
Isaacman later said on X that, because the spacecraft would not rendezvous with the International Space Station and has limited consumables, it was particularly limited by the forecast during the splashdown window.
“At the moment, the conditions are not favorable tonight or tomorrow, so we will assess day by day,” he said.
The timing of the next launch could be further complicated by the fact that the first-stage booster of another SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which sent a constellation of Starlink satellites into orbit, flipped over and exploded during an attempt to land on a waiting droneship.
Although landing the boosters is a secondary consideration, reusability of the entire rocket system is core to SpaceX's business model, and the loss broke a three-year streak of successful first stage landings.
SpaceX announced it was holding back from launching the next set of Starlink satellites while it reviewed the data.
An earlier attempt to launch Polaris Dawn on Tuesday was aborted because of a helium leak in a line connecting the tower to the rocket.
high radiation zone
Riding atop a Falcon 9 rocket, the SpaceX Dragon capsule is set to reach an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) — higher than any manned mission in more than half a century since the Apollo era.
Mission commander Isaacman will guide his four-member crew through the main part of the mission: the first spacewalk performed by non-professional astronauts equipped with newly developed SpaceX extravehicular activity (EVA) suits.
The team includes mission pilot Scott Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, mission specialist Sarah Gillis, a principal space operations engineer at SpaceX, and mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon, a principal space operations engineer at SpaceX.
The four trained for more than two years to prepare for this historic mission, including hundreds of hours spent in simulators, as well as skydiving, centrifuge training, scuba diving and climbing a volcano in Ecuador.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, the result of a collaboration between Isaacman, the founder of tech company Shift4 Payments, and SpaceX.
Isaacman declined to disclose his total investment in the project, though reports suggest he paid about $200 million for the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission in September 2021, the first all-civilian orbital mission.
Polaris Dawn will reach its highest altitude on its first day, and will briefly enter the Van Allen radiation belts, a region filled with high-energy charged particles that could pose health hazards to humans over long periods of time.
On the third day, crew members will don their state-of-the-art EVA spacesuits – equipped with head-up displays, helmet cameras and advanced joint mobility systems – and take turns exiting their spacecraft in groups of two.
Each spacecraft will spend 15 to 20 minutes in space, 435 miles above Earth's surface.
Also on their to-do list are testing laser-based satellite communications between spacecraft and Starlink (SpaceX's constellation of more than 6,000 internet satellites) to increase the speed of space communications, and performing about 40 scientific experiments.
After spending six days in space, the mission will end with a space landing off the coast of Florida.
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