Just a few months after spending three days in space, American billionaire Jared Isaacman announced on Monday that he plans three new private missions with SpaceX, the first of which this year will include a spacewalk.
The missions will use SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, except for the third, which will be the “first flight with humans on board” of the new Starship megarocket, currently under development by Elon Musk’s company.
This announcement represents a new step for the private space exploration sector, with SpaceX clearly positioning itself in the niche of distant exploration, until then reserved for government agencies.
The first mission of the three, dubbed Polaris Dawn, will attempt to reach “the highest Earth orbit ever” by flying “higher” than any SpaceX manned mission to date, according to a statement.
In September, entrepreneur Jared Isaacman chartered the Inspiration4 mission, the world’s first to send only civilians into space, without a professional astronaut. The flight reached an altitude of 590 km, farther than the International Space Station (ISS).
Polaris Dawn will take off from Florida in the “fourth quarter of this year” at the earliest, and is expected to last up to 5 days, according to the release.
A spacewalk, unprecedented for the company, is planned “at an altitude of about 500 kilometers” and should serve as a test for new spacesuits developed by SpaceX, adapted to these extravehicular walks.
The mission will have four crew members, including Jared Isaacmam himself, head of the financial company Shift4 Payments and an experienced pilot, who will once again be the commander.
He will be joined by pilot Scott Poteet, a former Air Force veteran who has worked for several of the billionaire’s companies and two SpaceX employees — Sarah Gillis, responsible for training Inspiration4’s newcomers for their space journey, and Anna Menon, who worked for NASA. for seven years before joining SpaceX.
It’s a crew of “experts”, a necessary prerequisite for such an ambitious mission, according to the press release.
The stated objective is therefore very different from the Inspiration4 mission, which was intended to demonstrate that space was accessible to everyone, including anonymous people.
The price of these missions, organized as part of a program called the Polaris Program — named after the polar star — has not been revealed. But it’s probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The manned flight aboard the new Starship rocket will be closely monitored: Starship has been selected by NASA to be the vehicle that will take astronauts back to the surface of the Moon, at least in 2025.
Elon Musk has promised that the Starship will reach space for the first time this year, with no one on board to begin with.
