SpaceX now plans to launch Polaris Dawn on August 26, a crewed flight into Earth orbit that will include the first-ever private spacewalk.
The news was announced by the Polaris Dawn team today (August 7) via Posted on Xexpanding a previously vague window; the latest target for the pioneering mission was in mid-August.
The Polaris Dawn spacecraft is scheduled to send four people into Earth’s orbit aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
The four crew members are billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, who will command the mission; pilot Scott “Kid” Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel; and mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both SpaceX engineers.
The Polaris Dawn spacecraft will take the quadruple into orbit around Earth, on a free-flying mission not tethered to the International Space Station. And the planned private spacewalks won’t be the only way they’ll make history: Polaris Dawn will orbit our planet at an altitude of about 435 miles (700 kilometers), taking the crew farthest from Earth since the Apollo era.
The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned crewed missions in the Polaris program, all of which will use SpaceX hardware. Isaacman will command and fund all three flights, as he did with Inspiration4, SpaceX’s flagship mission to Earth orbit in September 2021.
Related: How SpaceX astronauts aboard the private Polaris Dawn spacecraft will attempt the first-ever “all-civilian” spacewalk
The Polaris Dawn spacecraft was originally scheduled to launch in 2022. The target date has been pushed back several times, in part due to the groundbreaking complexity of the ambitious mission.
SpaceX already has one crewed mission in orbit right now — Crew-8, which sent four astronauts to the International Space Station for NASA in March for a six-month stint. The Crew-8 quartet will return home soon, to be replaced by Crew-9, which is scheduled to launch to the orbiting lab on Sept. 24.
