The The last time Jared Isaacman went into spaceHe chose to go with a crew of three people who had no prior experience in space travel. This time, the founder of payment services company Shift4 is taking an even bigger risk.
Isaacman will help fund and participate in the Polaris Dawn flight from SpaceXwill take crews higher than anyone since the 1970s, entering the Van Allen radiation belt 870 miles above Earth (and about 185 miles higher (more than the International Space Station). On the same flight, the billionaire and other crew members will participate in a spacewalk, connected to the spacecraft by only a tether and an oxygen tube. They will be the first private citizens to perform a spacewalk in history.
That journey will be made using a new type of spacesuit (technically called an extravehicular activity (EVA) suit), designed and developed by SpaceX in just 2.5 years.
SpaceX is targeting a launch date of August 26 for the mission, which is expected to last five days. Join IsaacmanThose who will command the mission are pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Isaacman’s friend and a retired lieutenant colonel in the US Air Force, along with SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both of whom will serve as mission specialists.
This was the first of three planned missions in the Polaris program, all of which Isaacman would command and help fund. However, the spacewalk was the highlight of the journey.
“Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars would require thousands of spacesuits; developing this suit and performing EVAs would be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions,” SpaceX said on the mission’s website..
