SpaceX has confirmed that last night the mission Polaris Dawn has exceeded 1,400 kilometres from the Earth’s surface during the peak of its orbit around our planet. Never before had a manned spacecraft reached such a high orbit and the four astronauts in the capsule Resilience They thus reach a distance that has only been surpassed by the Apollo missions to the Moon, which ended in December 1972.
During the years leading up to the Moon landing, another NASA spacecraft—the Gemini 11— had achieved a space record that has remained unbeaten to this day. During its four-day flight, from September 12 to 15, 1966, it reached an orbit with a maximum distance of 1,373 kilometers. And since then, no one has orbited that high. At most, less than half that height, when a NASA shuttle went up in April 1990 to deploy the space telescope. Hubblewhich orbits 570 kilometers above the Earth.
The capsule Resiliencea Crew Dragon spacecraft that SpaceX has adapted for the challenges of the Polaris Dawn mission, achieved the new orbital height record almost 15 hours after its launch yesterday from Cape Canaveral (Florida, USA). First, it completed eight elliptical orbits with high eccentricity: passing at an altitude of 190 kilometers at its closest point to Earth and reaching as far away as 1,200 kilometers. It was then that the ship fired its engines again, to raise the apogee to 1,400 kilometers.
This is the second time that Isaacman, founder of the payment processing company Shift4, has flown into space. As on the first occasion – on the mission Inspiration4 in 2021—the entrepreneur, philanthropist and pilot is the commander. Rounding out the crew are retired U.S. Air Force pilot Scott Poteet and mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. The two marked two milestones yesterday, becoming the first SpaceX staff members to travel to space. And as of today, Gillis and Menon are the women who have flown the highest in history, breaking NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan’s record of 621 km when she participated in the Hubble deployment in 1990.
Last night, when mission control Polaris Dawn He informed the ship that they had just passed 1,400 kilometers in height and were “farther from Earth than anyone else since the last mission.” Apollomore than 50 years ago,” Isaacman replied: “Now we hope that our friends from the program Sagebrush “take us to even greater heights.” NASA hopes that the Artemis III mission, in collaboration with SpaceX, will take a woman to the Moon for the first time in 2026.
Meanwhile, by breaking this space altitude record today, the mission’s spacecraft Polaris Dawn has entered the first Van Allen radiation belt surrounding our planet and is taking advantage of the opportunity to carry out scientific experiments that assess the risks of operating in this environment, which is more hostile than usual for astronauts: after several short passes during the six orbits they make at that altitude, it is estimated that they will have received as much space radiation as during a stay of several months on the International Space Station.
Another critical moment of the mission will come on Thursday, during the third day of the mission: then, the Dragon capsule hatch will open and the entire crew will experience the complete vacuum of floating in open space, something that very few of the current astronauts get to do. In addition, two of the crew members, Isaacman and Gillis, will then take a spacewalk that will be the first private one; that is, carried out by astronauts who do not belong to a government space agency. With all these ambitious milestones ahead, SpaceX has designed a new spacesuit that it is testing for the first time on this mission.
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