SpaceX targeting Aug. 26 for historic Polaris Dawn astronaut mission (Image Credit: Space.com)
SpaceX is now targeting Aug. 26 for the launch of Polaris Dawn, a crewed flight to Earth orbit that will feature the first-ever private spacewalk.
The news, which the Polaris Dawn team announced today (Aug. 7) via a post on X, firms up a previously vague window; the most recent target for the groundbreaking mission was mid-August.
Polaris Dawn will send four people to Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which will lift off from NASA‘s Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
Those four crewmembers are billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who will command the mission; pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel; and mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both of whom are SpaceX engineers.
Polaris Dawn will take the quartet to Earth orbit, on a free-flying mission that does not link up with the International Space Station (ISS). The planned private spacewalk(s) aren’t the only way it will make history: Polaris Dawn will circle our planet at an altitude of about 435 miles (700 kilometers), taking the crew farther from Earth than any mission since the Apollo era.
Polaris Dawn 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, a groundbreaking SpaceX mission to Earth orbit in September 2021.
Related: How SpaceX’s private Polaris Dawn astronauts will attempt the 1st-ever ‘all-civilian’ spacewalk
Polaris Dawn was originally scheduled to launch in 2022. The target date has been pushed back multiple times, due in part to the ambitious mission’s pioneering complexity.
SpaceX already has one crewed mission in orbit at the moment — Crew-8, which sent four astronauts to the ISS for NASA this past March for a six-month stint. The Crew-8 quartet will come home soon, to be replaced by the Crew-9 astronauts, who are scheduled to launch toward the orbiting lab on Sept. 24.
