The crew for the upcoming privately crew flight of Polaris Dawn mission arrived at Kennedy Space Center earlier this week and are now in final preparations for their upcoming flight aboard a Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon.

The Polaris Dawn launch window opens at 03:38 AM EDT Tuesday August 27 and extends until 07:10 AM the same day. If for some reason the launch is called off Tuesday, the next opportunity is Wednesday, August 28 using the same times.

Once aloft, the mission is planned to last five days.

“After more than two years of training, we are excited to embark on this mission,” said Jared Isaacman, commander of the Polaris Dawn mission earlier this week.

“We are incredibly thankful for this opportunity and to the thousands of SpaceX engineers who have contributed to this endeavor. We hope the results from our mission will accelerate SpaceX’s vision to make life multiplanetary and support St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and its efforts to improve global survival rates for childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Throughout our mission, we will aim to inspire humankind to look up and imagine what we can achieve here on Earth and in the worlds beyond our own.”

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Highest Orbit Since Gemini

Isaacmen will be joined by Sarah Gillis, Anna Menon and Scott “Kid” Poteet on the Polaris Dawn mission, which plans to eventually fly at an orbital attitude of ~700 km (~435 miles) above the surface of the Earth, the highest since Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon flew Gemini 11 to a 1,373 km (~853 miles) in 1966.

To provide a bit of contrast, the International Space Station orbits the Earth at around 400 km (~250 miles), and the Hubble Space Telescope is at 515 km (320 miles). Polaris Dawn will be above both.

Official Links
Polaris Dawn Official Website
SpaceX Polaris Dawn Mission Page

First Commercial Spacewalk

The mission also plans to conduct the first all-private spacewalk. All four astronauts will don new spacesuits built by SpaceX for this mission, while two will actually exit the depressurized Falcon 9.

“The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions,” Isaacman said Monday at Kennedy Space Center.

During their spacewalk, the crew will conduct tests to provide data that will provide SpaceX engineers with in-flight data of each suit’s performance, strengths, and weaknesses. That, in turn, will inform improvements, allowing SpaceX teams to produce and scale the suit for future long-duration missions.

LASER-based Space Communication

The mission will also test a new communications system while in flight. Using optical-based transmitters and receivers, Polaris Dawn will link with Starlink satellites, which will then link to Earth.

This will provide greater bandwidth than the current TDRSS (Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) system used by current American spaceflights and of course ISS with military usage also being an important role for the system.

TDRSS has been in place since the 1980s, and while it has been a robust and reliable form of communication, its services are limited by the amount of usage for ISS, crewed flights, and other missions.

Currently, TDRSS provides about 6 Megabit per second in the S-band and 800 Mb/s in the Ku/Ka bands. That’s roughly what a home with cable broadband gets, and while that’s a decent amount of broadband, it is very busy and does no have a great deal of additional capacity.

The LASER links to Starlink will provide more bandwidth and multiple connections, giving more data flow to and from the Earth. With the growth of commercial spaceflight and the promise of commercial space stations in the near future, clearly a new system is needed.

Medical Experiments

Polaris Dawn will conduct at least forty human health experiments while in orbit, providing vital data to SpaceX about the physiological changes and effects of spaceflight on the human body, which in turn will help the company and others prepare future astronauts for long-duration flight both in orbit but also on the moon and for flights to and from Mars.

While it would be easy to overlook these experiments, new data on spaceflight and humans can only add to the knowledge already gathered through the years, particularly on ISS. The results that Polaris Dawn astronauts provide will confirm or question previous results, for example, and that can only improve the lives of future astronauts.

Talk of Titusville will be providing full coverage of the Polaris Dawn flight. Be sure to check back over the next few days for crew biographies, launch previews and more!

_{Note: article uses quotes from the Polaris Dawn website.}