(Washington) SpaceX and American billionaire Jared Isaacman, who returned from his first trip to space only a few months ago, announced on Monday a partnership for three new missions, the first of which scheduled for this year will include a spacewalk. , in combination.
Posted at 5:12 p.m.
The third mission will also be the “first flight with humans on board” for the new Starship mega-rocket, currently under development by Elon Musk’s company.
This announcement represents a new milestone for the private space exploration sector, as SpaceX seeks to carry out increasingly ambitious missions.
It is a “mini-space program,” Mr. Isaacman boldly argued at a press conference. The goal is to develop SpaceX’s “long-duration spaceflight capabilities”, with the “ultimate goal of facilitating the exploration of Mars”, said the boss of the financial company Shift4.
The program, named Polaris in reference to the North Star, is funded by both SpaceX and Jared Isaacman. But the businessman refused to give specific figures. The amount is probably in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The first mission, “Polaris Dawn” (dawn, in English), will have four crew members. Mr. Isaacman, an experienced pilot, will be the commander. It will last up to five days and lift off from Florida “in the fourth quarter of this year” at the earliest, aboard a Falcon 9 rocket – which already carries NASA astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
A spacewalk, unprecedented for the company, is planned “at an altitude of around 500 kilometers” and should serve as a test for new spacesuits developed by SpaceX, adapted to these extravehicular outings.
The Dragon capsule’s hatch will be open, and in the absence of an airlock, the entire crew will be exposed to the vacuum of space. The decision of who goes away will be made during training in the coming months, Isaacman said.
“Highest Earth Orbit”
In September, the billionaire had already chartered the Inspiration4 space mission, the first in the world to send into space only complete amateurs, without a professional astronaut on board. The SpaceX ship had traveled to an altitude of 590 km, already further than the ISS.
This time, “Polaris Dawn” will fly “higher” than any SpaceX manned mission so far, and attempt to soar to “the highest Earth orbit ever achieved,” according to a statement.
Jared Isaacman indicated that the altitude would be of the order of that of NASA’s Gemini program, whose 11and mission had gone up to 1370 km.
However, this distance will still be very far from the approximately 380,000 km separating the Earth and the Moon, reached by NASA astronauts during the Apollo program.
In addition to Jared Isaacman himself, the ship will carry pilot Scott Poteet, a former US Air Force veteran who worked for several of the billionaire’s companies.
Two SpaceX employees will also be part of the trip. The first, Sarah Gillis, is responsible for the astronaut training program for the company, and had trained Jared Isaacman himself for Inspiration4.
The second, Anna Menon, worked for NASA for seven years before joining SpaceX. She should beat her husband by going to orbit first, he has just been chosen by the American space agency to become an astronaut.
One of the goals of the mission is also to collect data on the radiation to which the crew will be exposed.
In the future, the first manned flight of the new Starship rocket will be particularly scrutinized: Starship has indeed been selected by NASA to be the vehicle that will bring astronauts back to the surface of the Moon, in 2025 at the earliest.
Elon Musk has promised that Starship will reach space for the first time this year, with no one on board to begin with.
But the schedule for this first test remains suspended for the moment due to a decision by the American aviation authority (FAA), on the environmental consequences of orbital flights from Texas, where SpaceX is located. The decision has been pushed back from late February to late March, the FAA said Monday.
Another billionaire, the Japanese Yusaku Maezawa, has booked his flight aboard Starship. This mission, called “DearMoon”, must go around the Moon. The date of 2023 first announced should probably be exceeded.