SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission will feature first private spacewalk

Four private citizens are set to launch next week on a mission to space that is expected to include the first spacewalk conducted entirely by a commercial crew.

Four private citizens are set to launch on an ambitious, first-of-its-kind space mission next week that is expected to include the first spacewalk conducted entirely by a commercial crew.

The mission, dubbed Polaris Dawn, is scheduled to lift off at 3:38 a.m. ET on Tuesday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SpaceX was initially targeting a Monday launch but said that delaying it one day “allows additional time for teams to complete preflight checkouts.”

Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of the payment processing company Shift4, will be commander of the Polaris Dawn flight. It’s the first of three planned spaceflights that Isaacman is funding and organizing in partnership with SpaceX, collectively known as the Polaris program. Isaacman launched to space as part of the first all-civilian SpaceX mission to orbit in 2021.

The crew of the Polaris Dawn mission, from left: Anna Menon, Sarah Gillis, Scott "Kidd" Poteet and Jared Isaacman.Anna Menon / Polaris ProgramThe mission’s three other crew members are Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who will be the pilot, and two SpaceX engineers, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.

They will ride into space in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The plan for the five-day mission is to send them to an orbital altitude more than three times higher than the International Space Station — the highest that humans have reached since the final Apollo moon mission in 1972.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/spacex-polaris-dawn-mission-first-private-spacewalk-rcna167166

---