Polaris Dawn Crew Arrives at KSC for Final Preps

The four member crew of Polaris Dawn arrived at the Kennedy  Space Center on Monday, August 19, to work in the final preparations for their flight, currently scheduled to launch next Monday, August 26 at 3:38 AM.  Amid the August conditions of high heat and humidity - but no thunderstorms - the four arrived in two of the camouflaged Dassault jets owned by mission commander Jared Isaacman, founder of The Polaris Program.

Left to right: Mission Specialist Anna Menon, Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Commander Jared Isaacman, Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now 

As has been mentioned here before, “Kidd” Poteet is former USAF fighter pilot. He will pilot the mission. Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis are both Lead Space Operations Engineers in the manned spaceflight side of SpaceX.  The best-known highlight of this mission is that it will be the first private mission to do a spacewalk. The two astronauts doing the spacewalk will be Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis. 

“It’s been two-and-a-half years since we announced the Polaris Program and Polaris Dawn,” Isaacman said. “It’s been a really exciting journey of development and training.”
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Isaacman and his crewmates have four main objectives over the course of the five days they will spend on orbit:

• Achieve an Earth-orbit altitude record at 1,400 km (879 mi) apogee
• Conduct the first commercial spacewalk using SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) suits
• Perform a technology demonstration of Starlink onboard the Dragon spacecraft
• Conduct about 40 experiments from 20 partner research institutions

Menon said the science data collected during the mission doesn’t end when the crew splashes down off the coast of Florida at the conclusion of their mission.

“When we get back, we will be recovered by the SpaceX recovery vessel and then we will owe some time to science and research and reconnecting with our families,” Menon said.

The Monday morning launch will push the Dragon capsule into a 190 x 1,200 km (118 x 746 mi) orbit. The first day on orbit will include raising Dragon’s apogee and passing through the inner regions of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt, an area that sees additional charged particles, largely from solar wind, a target of the mission. 

“We stand to learn quite a bit from that, in terms of human health, science and research. If we get to Mars someday, we’d love to come back and be healthy enough to tell people about it,” Isaacman said. “So, I think that it’s worthwhile to get some exposure in that environment.

“It also informs vehicle architecture because, generally speaking, vehicles don’t like radiation. So that’s why we’re going to stay there for the shortest amount of time that’s necessary to gather the data we want.”

Beyond the human research benefit of this, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, said the mission’s dynamic flight profile will also help the company towards certifying their Crew Dragon spacecraft beyond five flights.

“The high altitude will give us exposure to this high-radiation environment, which will test a lot of avionic systems and their ability to recover,” Gerstenmaier said. “We build a lot of auto sequences to take care of that for us, but we’ll see how it really works. We’ll also get a chance to see the laser communication, which I think is a big deal moving forward.”

The laser communication will be a test between the Dragon capsule and the Starlink network, which currently can communicate by laser. SpaceX Engineer Anna Menon teased that test by saying, “You’ll want to stay tuned for that,” but didn’t go into details about the planned demonstrations. It's set for flight day four.

The highlight of the mission, though, is the space walk.  It has been an emphasis of the mission since it was first publicized, partly because of this artist's rendering you might have seen before:

Image credit: PolarisProgram

It won't be like that. 

One of the marquee moments of the mission will be when the crew brings the Dragon down to vacuum and performs the first commercial spacewalk. The full operation will take roughly two hours, during which time, both Isaacman and Gillis will egress the vehicle, one at a time, while remaining attached to a roughly 12-foot-long tether.

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“We’ve covered everything from life-cycle testing, pressure testing, MMOD testing, extreme hot and colds testing, an entire campaign on ESD and flammability testing. It’s been a really impressive amount of work by the SpaceX team to test this suit for flight,” Gillis said. “As a crew, we’ve spent probably more than 100 hours in this suit at this point… We’re really looking forward to testing this first generation of suit.”

She noted that during the spacewalk, the Dragon spacecraft will be oriented in a way that will shield the crew members from direct sunlight.

Isaacman said that while he and Gillis in turn won’t be free-floating outside of the spacecraft, he said they will fully exit the vehicle during the spacewalk. He said during the operation they will be “well above where the hatch is.”

“We have a hands-free demonstration where it’ll only be our feet engaged in a mobility aid, we’re just not going to be just floating around,” Isaacman said. “It takes a lot of effort to move in the suit when it’s pressurized. What looks like really heavy clothing, becomes super rigid when it’s pressurized.

“So, you want to be very deliberate with your movements. You want to make good use of mobility aids.”

The mission has been a long time coming. Part of that was development of the suits, and part has been modifications to the Dragon capsule itself. A neat little tidbit I picked up at SpaceNews.com is that Kidd Poteet (remember, a former Air Force fighter pilot), said that he spent 1500 hours in simulators for combat training during 20 years of Air Force service. In the 2-1/2 years training for Polaris Dawn, he noted the crew spent 2,000 hours in simulators. 1500 hours over 20 years for combat training vs. 2000 hours in simulators over 2-1/2 years? Which group seems more serious? He said the four of them also did other training that ranged from scuba diving to mountain climbing. 

Closing words I found inspirational.

[Bill] Gerstenmaier, who came to SpaceX following a decades-long career at NASA said it’s been a fun process creating the suits and now being on the cusp of seeing them used in practice. He described the process as leveraging knowledge from NASA and “then we push it a little bit further in other areas,” making sure to share lessons learned along the way.

“This pace of development that we get to do at SpaceX is very much like the pace of development that was required back in the early Apollo days,” Gerstenmaier said. “We’re getting a chance to do that again where we’re really starting to push frontiers with the private sector and learning new things that we would not be able to learn by staying in the risk-free environment here on Earth.

“It’s time to go out. It’s time to explore. It’s time to do these big things and move forward.”