A Finale on the Polaris Dawn Mission

Sunday morning, as planned, the Polaris Dawn Crew Dragon capsule splashed into the waters west of the Dry Tortugas. Splashdown was at 3:37 AM instead of the 3:36 listed in the schedule earlier Saturday, but I'm going to assume there's really not much that can be done to a capsule landing under parachutes to make it take meaningfully more or less time to get down. I think the answer is "close enough." 

In the world of privately funded manned spaceflight, this had to be the most ambitious flight ever. In Jared Isaacman's first privately funded spaceflight, Inspiration4, just putting four civilians in orbit was remarkable. Since then, aside from acting as the dedicated "ISS Taxi" for NASA, SpaceX has brought astronauts from another private company, Axiom Space, to the ISS three separate times. (Axiom's 4th flight is currently penciled in for next spring).  In overview, Polaris Dawn was unlike all the other private space flights. It wasn't just a suborbital ride above the Karman line so riders could say they've been in space, nor was it a ride to what's effectively the orbiting Grand Hotel and University Labs of the Space Station. 

It was record setting. 

On the first day of the flight, the mission flew to an altitude of 1,408.1 km. The headline has been that it's the first time a human has been that far up since the last Apollo flight passed through it on the way to reentry. I tend to think of the record as going back a little past that to Gemini 11 in 1966, which rather deliberately, like Polaris Dawn, went to that altitude to orbit rather than "just passing through." 

Then, on the third day of the flight, the space walk took place. More a test of the EVA suits overall function than the sort of tethered spacewalk of Gemini 4, or the ISS astronauts much more recently, it still set records for things never done by private space missions.  As Eric Berger points out at Ars Technica:

Although this foray into space largely repeated what the Soviet Union, and then the United States, performed in the mid-1960s, with tethered spacewalks, it nonetheless was significant. These commercial spacesuits cost a fraction of government suits and can be considered version 1.0 of suits that could one day enable many people to walk in space, on the Moon, and eventually Mars.

Remember: SpaceX openly talks about needing millions of spacesuits like these. More than any other company in the space industry that I'm aware of, SpaceX is the master of rapid iteration. If that was version 1.0, the designers probably have done another version every day since Thursday.  At least one.  

This wasn't just a billionaire "joy ride" in which Jared Isaacman got to enjoy a week of thrill-seeking that mere mortals can't remotely afford. This was a high risk, important adventure from start to finish. 

The reality is that Isaacman and his hand-picked crew, which included two SpaceX employees who will take their learnings back to design spacecraft and other vehicles at the company, trained hard for this mission over the better part of two years. In flying such a daring profile to a high altitude through potential conjunctions with thousands of satellites, and then venting their cabin to perform a spacewalk, each of the crew members assumed high risks.

For its Crew Dragon missions that fly to and from the International Space Station, NASA has an acceptable "loss-of-crew" probability of 1-in-270. But in those spaceflights the crew spends significantly less time inside Dragon and flies to a much lower and safer altitude. They do not conduct spacewalks out of Dragon. The crew of Polaris Dawn, therefore, assumed non-trivial dangers in undertaking this spaceflight. These risks assumed were measured rather than reckless.

So why? Why take such risks? Because the final frontier, after nearly seven decades of spaceflight, remains largely unexplored. If it is human destiny to one day expand to other worlds, and eventually other stars, we're going to need to do so with more than a few government astronauts making short sorties. To open space there must be lower cost access and commercial potential.

The streak at the upper left, about the apparent height of the moon, is Polaris Dawn during reentry. The vessels in the foreground are the deployed recovery ships ready to go and secure the capsule. Image credit: Polaris Program/John Kraus

To edit the line I ended with on Thursday, this was more than one small walk for a man and woman; this was one giant leap for mankind.