Set for 2nd SpaceX flight, billionaire Isaacman all business about spacewalk for Polaris Dawn mission

Billionaire Jared Isaacman already flew to space on the Inspiration4 mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon, and he thought he was done.

But it turns out, he was just getting started. He’s set to return with three new crewmates on Polaris Dawn, the first of three planned missions in partnership with SpaceX, now targeting a summer liftoff from Kennedy Space Center.

“It felt like we set the bar really high and the doors opened for a lot of exciting missions to follow,” he said during an appearance Thursday at SpaceCom, a commercial space convention at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando.

In September 2021, he launched on a three-day orbital flight marking the first time a spacecraft had flown with an all-private crew. Issacman footed the bill after making a fortune as the founder and CEO of shift4 payments, a credit card processing company.

“It was a great mission. It showed it could be done,” he said. “We got a lot of great science and research done. We had the youngest American to go into space, a childhood cancer survivor who became our medical officer, the first Black female pilot of a spacecraft — hopefully we lived up to a lot of our inspirational objectives and we raised nearly $250 million for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.”

For his new missions, though, the focus has changed. Now it’s about proving just how far a private endeavor can push the boundaries, all in an effort to move the needle for civilization as he, just like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, seeks to make life multiplanetary.

“All of the objectives of the Polaris program have to answer the question, ‘Does this help get us to Mars?'” he said.

Polaris Dawn is set to tackle one of the biggest hurdles, the first commercial spacewalk. Flying once again in the Crew Dragon Resilience, the entire spacecraft will have all the air sucked out and two of the four crew will venture out into open space on a tether.

“There’s only about 600 lucky people who have been to orbit. Almost entirely came from world superpowers. And there’s a lot of learning that needs to take place as space opens up beyond just the few and into the many,” he said. “So, spacewalk, yay. If we’re going to go to moon and make life multiplanetary, we’re going to have to leave the safety and comfort of the habitat or the vehicle to do this.”

Figuring out how to do that, and making what will be the first new generation of extra-vehicular activity (EVA) spacesuit in about 40 years, are big targets for the Polaris Program, and for SpaceX too as it wants to learn how to mass-produce spacesuits that may be needed in the future on the lunar surface and Mars.

“That knowledge lives really entirely within three or four organizations in the world. That needs to spread,” he said.

Polaris Dawn’s other three passengers are Scott Poteet, given the title of mission pilot, specialist Sarah Gillis, and specialist and medical officer Anna Menon. Both Gillis and Menon are SpaceX employees.

Just which two of the four will be out in space and which two will remain back in support roles has yet to be announced, but all have been in training including time spent at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

“There’s no airlock on Dragon, so we’ll be venting the entire vehicle down to vacuum. So as far as I’m concerned, all four crew members are doing an EVA,” he said.

Polaris Dawn has two other objectives during its five-day flight including traveling beyond the record of 853 miles altitude set for a human low-Earth orbit mission back in 1966 when NASA astronauts Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon flew on Gemini 11, which is near the Van Allen radiation belt.

“We’ll be there just long enough to get the data we need and we’ll come back down, but if you think about it, we haven’t flown through that in 50 years,” he said. “There’s a lot from a human physiology perspective to it. There’s a lot from a vehicle design architecture.”

The last objective is testing out communications with SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, something that will be needed as more humans venture farther out in a growing space economy, he said.

The Polaris Program has two more flights on tap with the second also flying in a Crew Dragon and potentially attempting a service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.

“NASA, SpaceX and Polaris began a study back in September to assess the feasibility of a rendezvous boost and augmentation of Hubble,” he said. “There’s been tons of progress on it, a lot of enthusiasm. From my perspective, it certainly builds off of Polaris Dawn, a lot of the things we are going to do on that mission, and if they’re successful, I could certainly see us building upon it for a mission like this.”

The last of the Polaris Program missions, though, is slated to be the first crewed mission of SpaceX’s in-development Starship.

That could take a while. Starship has yet to make its first orbital test flight, and SpaceX will be focusing on making it safe for humans through a series of Starlink satellite launches while also working to complete the Human Landing System version for NASA’s Artemis III mission.

But Isaacman said that with the pace SpaceX and other companies have been on, it could be sooner than later, noting that Starship could be launching from both its Texas site and Kennedy Space Center, and the factories are already spitting out the parts for a high rate of use.

“It’s exciting. I think a lot of progress can happen very quickly. It has not been three years since human spaceflight has been restored to the U.S.,” noting the first crewed Dragon flight in May 2020 and now coming up on the ninth crewed flight with NASA’s Crew-6 mission. “That’s an awful lot of progress in less than three years.

“So I’d say once Starship gets to orbit, the pace of progress is going to be high. Who knows what’s possible? It’s real a game changer for spaceflight.”

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