- By Ashish Singh
- Fri, 23 Aug 2024 07:01 PM (IST)
- Source:Reuters
SpaceX will try the first-ever private spacewalk, testing ground-breaking gear including airlock-free cabins and thin spacesuits in one of the riskiest missions to yet for Elon Musk's space enterprise.
Two SpaceX employees, a retired military fighter pilot, and a rich businessman are set to launch on a modified Crew Dragon craft on Tuesday. Two days later, they will go on a 20-minute spacewalk that will take them 434 miles (700 km) into space.
Up until now, government astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), located 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, have been the only people to attempt stepping into the vast void of space.
The five-day Polaris Dawn mission by SpaceX will orbit the Earth in an oval form, travelling as near to 190 km (118 miles) as well as far as 1,400 km (870 miles), which is the furthest any person has gone since the Apollo moon program ended in 1972.
The millionaire Jared Isaacman will be among the crew members donning SpaceX's new, slimline spacesuits in a Crew Dragon vehicle that has been modified to open its hatch door in space vacuum—an unprecedented procedure that does away with the requirement for an airlock.
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"They're pushing the envelope in multiple ways," NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman stated in a previous interview. "They're also going to a much higher altitude, with a more severe radiation environment than we've been to since Apollo," he added.
Isaacman, the creator of Shift4, an electronic payment startup, is funding the mission. Although he has refrained from disclosing the exact amount he has spent, it is believed to exceed $100 million.
Alongside him will be former lieutenant colonel and mission pilot Scott Poteet, as well as senior engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon from SpaceX.
For SpaceX, a company that has led the way in both costly private spaceflight and low-cost, reusable rocketry, the mission presents a chance to develop technology that may find application on the moon and Mars.
The electronics and shielding on Crew Dragon and the spacesuits will be put to the test as they travel through sections of the Van Allen belt, which is an area where charged particles primarily emanating from the sun can interfere with satellite electronics and have an impact on human health. This is far outside the shielding bubble of Earth's atmosphere.
"That's an additional risk that you don't face when you just stay in low-Earth orbit and go up to the ISS," Reisman stated.
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The third day of the mission will see the Polaris spacewalk, but preparations will start roughly 45 hours beforehand. The whole cabin of the gumdrop-shaped Crew Dragon will be depressurised and open to space pressure. Only two astronauts will be able to float outdoors while attached to an oxygen line; the rest of the crew will be dependent on their spacesuits to survive.
The crew will start a "pre-breathe" procedure a few days prior to the spacewalk in order to purge the cabin of all nitrogen and replace it with pure oxygen.
If astronauts' bloodstreams include nitrogen, it may create bubbles, obstruct blood flow, and cause decompression sickness, also referred to as "the bends," which is similar to what happens to scuba divers who surface dive too soon.
One of several instruments being used in the mission to inform dozens of scientific experiments, the crew will utilise an ultrasound gadget to detect any bubble formation. This will provide researchers with a unique look at how astronauts would fare on the moon or elsewhere in deep space.
Vice chair for aerospace medicine at the University of Central Florida's school of Internal Medicine, Emmanuel Urquieta, said, "It gives us a very unique opportunity to test these vehicles in such a very unique environment."
Although NASA closely monitors astronaut safety on its flights, there are no comparable laws or criteria in the United States for spaceflight safety on private missions like Polaris.
At a press briefing on Monday, SpaceX representatives and the Polaris crew stated they had prepared for a variety of contingency scenarios in the event that something goes wrong with the mission, such as an oxygen leak or a hatch door that isn't sealed. However, they did not go into detail about what those possibilities were.
Reisman stated that he is familiar with the Polaris crew and thinks they are equipped to deal with any unforeseen emergencies. "But there's not a lot of room for error," he stated.