Sliding Launch Schedules Around - Polaris Dawn Up Next

On the day of the NASA teleconference that didn't say much, there was some good news. 

With the Crew 9 flight moved to late September, SpaceX has announced a launch date for the Polaris Dawn mission. NET August 26 - they didn't announce a time. This reverses the previous order. 

I've been aware of the Polaris Dawn mission since I came across a news item talking about it in February of '22 and have been trying to track it since then. It's an interesting mission with rather ambitious goals, and really a joint effort between Jared Isaacman's charitable organization and SpaceX. The short version is it aims to be the reach the highest Earth orbit ever flown, intentionally attempting to fly through the Van Allen Radiation Belts. Once there, they plan to do the first ever commercial space walk or extravehicular activity (EVA). To do this, they'll wear the SpaceX EVA suits shown here August 1st. Of course there's much more. This is a screen capture from the mission web site.

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.

Inspiration4 was the first Polaris private mission, Polaris Dawn in about three weeks will be the second. There is talk of a third mission after Dawn that will be flown on the Dragon capsule just like the first two, but there are no details about it on the Polaris website. It simply says: 

Building upon Polaris Dawn, this mission will continue to expand the boundaries of future human spaceflight missions, in-space communications, and scientific research.

Interesting, but content-free. 

Finally there is to be a fourth mission from Polaris, which is to be the first crewed flight of Starship. Even before any NASA Human Landing System missions. There is no announced date or other details. 

I've run this picture a couple of times, so to remind anyone who needs it and for the new readers this time, this is the Polaris Dawn crew during an EVA training mission in '22.  From top right, clockwise, Jared “Rook” Isaacman, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Sarah Gillis, Anna Menon. Note that Isaccman and Poteet are both executives at Shift4 as well as extremely qualified pilots; both Gillis and Menon are engineers with SpaceX on the manned spaceflight side, so probably not cool enough to have nicknames like Rook or Kidd.  (Inside joke for other engineer geeks).