One of the most ambitious and inspiring space missions ever is currently going on around Earth. The Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft was successfully launched on top of a Falcon 9 with the four private astronauts of the Polaris Dawn mission.
On September 10, at 09:23 UTC the rocket lifted off from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center. The second stage detached from booster B1083 almost 3 minutes into the flight. At 09:33 UTC, the first stage landed on the offshore droneship Just Read The Instructions.
Photos from today's launch of the Polaris Dawn mission from pad 39A in Florida pic.twitter.com/SUqSW8CSpj
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 10, 2024
The second stage engine ran six minutes after the stage separation, taking the crew Dragon in an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 1,700 kilometers and a perigee of 190 kilometers. The capsule detached from the second stage at 09:36, starting its stand-alone five-day flight in Earth orbit.
The crew consists of the entrepreneur and philanthropist, Jared Isacmaan, the mission pilot Scott Poteet, and the two SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.
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From Inspiration4 to Polaris Dawn
Jared Isaacman is the funder and organizer of the Polaris Program, and the mission commander of Polaris Dawn. His collaboration with SpaceX started in 2021 when he financed and commanded the first all-civilian mission to Earth orbit, Inspiration4.
The aim of Inspiration4 was twofold: inspire the world about human spaceflight and raise awareness and funding for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading research facility for treating childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.
The mission was successful in both objectives, sending into space for the first time a crew of four not professional astronauts on a three-day trip around the Earth and raising more than $240 million for St. Jude, almost the same amount of money spent by Isaacman to fund the mission.
SpaceX used the well-proven human spaceflight system with the Falcon 9 launcher and the Crew Dragon capsule to fulfill the mission. Company engineers brought modifications to the Resilience spacecraft to host the four private astronauts for three days, including a monolithic multi-layer domed plexiglass cupola mounted instead of the docking adapter used to mate the Dragon with the International Space Station. The new configuration allowed the crew to run several health experiments and take incredible pictures and videos of the Earth from the cupola to inspire the public.
The Polaris Program and the Polaris Dawn mission in particular have been designed starting from the learnings of Inspiration4. During the mission, the crew will perform new health experiments to improve the knowledge about spaceflight consequences to the human body, adding new activities, including the first Extra-Vehicular Activity performed by private astronauts. The selected crew Dragon spacecraft is again the Resilience, to which other modifications have been applied to support the new activities.
Additional details about the Polaris Dawn mission can be found in the Space Voyaging Guide to Polaris Dawn.
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Polaris Program, a set of three private missions to space
The Polaris Program aims to “rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities while continuing to raise funds and awareness for important causes here on Earth,” as stated on its website. It consists of three different human spaceflight missions, as the Polaris constellation is made of three stars. Polaris Dawn is the first of the set.
The second one will leverage all the learnings of its predecessor and will still use the crew Dragon spacecraft. The mission objectives still need to be officialized, however, in 2022 NASA and SpaceX reached an agreement to study the feasibility of reboosting the Hubble telescope using the Crew Dragon, as part of the Polaris Program.
The third mission will be based on the new SpaceX transportation system, the Starship vehicle. It will be the first human spaceflight for the spacecraft, sending cargo and crews to several space destinations like the Moon and Mars.
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