The four commercial astronauts on the mission Polaris Dawn have returned to Earth, after successfully landing in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, near the Dry Tortugas National Park (Florida, USA) at 9:36 Spanish peninsular time. After an hour of deorbiting and re-entry maneuvers into the atmosphere, the capsule Resilience The spacecraft went from orbiting Earth at 27,000 kilometres per hour to landing at around 25 kilometres per hour, thanks to four giant parachutes. This soft landing marked the end of a five-day flight that has taken the crew to orbit 1,400 kilometres above our planet, further than anyone had gone since the last trip to the Moon in 1972.
This groundbreaking space flight will also go down in history for having completed the first two private spacewalks, carried out by technology magnate Jared Isaacman and aerospace engineer Sarah Gillis. Until now, this feat of exiting a spacecraft into open space was something that was reserved only for professional astronauts, belonging to a few government space agencies.
What was special about this mission?
This is not the first time that billionaire Jared Isaacman has financed and led a SpaceX space flight. In 2021, he paid to make his dream of being the space commander on the mission come true. Inspiration4which was the first manned orbital flight in which no professional astronauts participated, only civilians. It lasted three days and orbited the Earth at a maximum of 585 kilometers — higher than any other manned spacecraft since 1999 — in the same capsule, called Resiliencewhich has also now been used for the mission Polaris Dawn. It is a Crew Dragon model spacecraft, manufactured and operated by SpaceX, which has been using them since 2020 to transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. In fact, the Resilience It was also the first Crew Dragon to carry a crew to the ISS, thus allowing a private company to take over the activity that the US space agency had been carrying out until 2011 with its own space shuttles.
The difference of the Polaris Dawn This time it is a collaboration between SpaceX and Isaacman, which inaugurates the space program Polarisdesigned to explore and expand the limits of current spaceflight. This first of three planned missions within this program has achieved several milestones, both for astronautics in general and for commercial spaceflight in particular.
What records has the Polaris Dawn broken and which is the most significant?
On the second day of flight, the spacecraft reached a maximum altitude of 1,400 kilometers, at the apogee of its elliptical orbit around the Earth. That is an absolute record in the history of the space race. No manned orbital flight had ever climbed so high. Only the spacecraft Gemini 11 NASA had come close, when it came within 1,375 kilometers in 1966.
Astronauts operating space stations are kept orbiting at a distance of a few hundred kilometres (for example, the ISS orbits at an average altitude of 420 kilometres). And the same was true for manned missions. Apollo In the 1960s and 1970s, after launch, the spacecraft would first remain in orbit a few hundred kilometres away, until a powerful thrust would propel them towards the Moon. Only then, and not while in orbit, did astronauts get farther from Earth than the Moon. Polaris DawnAnd no one has done it again since the Apollo program ended in 1972, more than half a century ago.
In addition, the two crew members — Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon — of the mission that just ended have become the women who have been the furthest from Earth, shattering the previous record of NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan (621 km, in 1990). Before Gillis and Menon, in addition, no other SpaceX employee had become an astronaut.
Does the orbital height reached have scientific significance, in addition to breaking several records?
Going so high means that the ship begins to leave low Earth orbit and begins to enter its border, marked by a radiation belt. This poses a significantly greater risk than at the height of the ISS, and that is why the Polaris Dawn He conducted several scientific experiments to assess the health effects of space radiation present in these areas.
Mission leaders argue that these tests are useful as a preliminary step to long-distance missions, with much greater exposure to space radiation, which will be necessary to return to the Moon or reach Mars.
A space walk in which you barely see your body?
The spacewalk was the most critical moment of the mission. And the live, multi-camera online broadcast brought the excitement and detail of this complex manoeuvre to millions of people like never before. The fact that the astronauts only partially exited the spacecraft does not detract from the merit: such unusual spacewalks have occurred 20 times in the history of space exploration, mostly during the early days of NASA’s or the Chinese space agency’s space programmes.
For the first time in history, an extravehicular activity has been carried out with technology, procedures, space suits and astronauts provided by private companies, without any involvement of a government space agency. It is a milestone that reflects how this new space race is unfolding, in which the current leader – the American NASA – no longer flies alone and uses ships from private companies. And one of these companies, SpaceX, is overtaking them with the development of the Starship mega-rocket and with the records that the company has already broken. Polaris Dawn.
What will be the next step of the program? Polaris?
Two more missions are planned so far. The next one will be similar to the one that just ended, but will seek to push the boundaries even further, according to the few details revealed so far by SpaceX and Jared Isaacman. The third and final mission Polaris This would already be a huge leap forward: it is planned to be the first manned mission of a Starship spacecraft.
There is still no date for those flights. And this week we have received news that dampens expectations, as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that it will not allow SpaceX to carry out the next test of a Starship before the end of November. Elon Musk’s space company has issued a statement of protest, as it believes that in order to complete the development of the most powerful spacecraft in history, they should be allowed to carry out tests more frequently, relaxing the controls required for this by the federal air and environmental regulations of the USA.
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