Less than a month left until the first private spacewalk in history

It has been announced that the SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission to perform the first commercial spacewalk in history will take place on July 30. The event has been repeatedly postponed from 2022, including due to the unavailability of SpaceX EVA spacesuits for extravehicular activity. The exact date of the event is still unknown, but it is clearly not far off.

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission will be a private affair for all intents and purposes. Four tourists will pay their own way on a private Falcon 9 rocket that will launch a privately-manned Crew Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where two of the travelers will perform the first “private” spacewalk.

The mission also plans to set a record for the highest orbital flight, reaching 1,400 km above the ground, which would be a new record after the flight of the Gemini 11 ship in 1966 – it reached an orbit of 1,368 km. Only the crews of the Apollo lunar ships have flown higher and further, but that’s a slightly different story.

The Polaris Dawn mission in 2021 was conceived and proposed to SpaceX by billionaire Jared Isacman. He and three other crew members will go on a tourist flight into space, where two of them will go out into open space from the Crew Dragon ship. To do this, it was necessary to upgrade the capsule – it is not designed to depressurize and restore pressure, and also to modify the standard spacesuits, for example, giving them more mobility and providing better protection.

And private astronauts will need protection. The ship will be launched into an elliptical orbit of 190 to 1200 km (the ascent to 1400 km will be made from it). This will lead to the ship entering the inner strip of the Van Allen radioactive belts surrounding the Earth. This will definitely not add to health. During this time, the team will conduct 38 experiments that will later allow them to study the effect of radiation in the belts on humans, equipment and spacesuits. The spacewalk will take place later, when the ship descends to an orbit of 700 km. The crew will stay in space for about a week.

It will be an exciting journey with adventures. The main thing is not with the same as the crew of Boeing Starliner. They were also promised only a week-long cruise, but they were stuck on the ISS for months.