
Elon Musk’s private rocket and exploration company, SpaceX, is bringing the outer space experience to private citizens with its upcoming “Polar Dawn” mission.
The program will allow non-governmental astronauts to perform a space walk for the first time in history. That’s not to say that SpaceX is sending any old random person into earth orbit; the four astronauts have been training together for years, and the group includes some highly skilled professionals.
The mission is set to launch, weather permitting, on August 26. The crew of four will ride up to the stars and live inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. As they spin around the earth the group will do experiments to gather data on the health hazards to humans from the radiation in space. The magnetic field around the earth, plus the atmosphere, protect us ground dwellers from a lot of radiation, but those above low-earth orbit have no such protection.
The project has been delayed several times, but the crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on August 19 in anticipation of the launch one week later. The Crew Dragon craft will ferry the astronauts up into space where they will perform their work and, hopefully, come back down to Earth in five days. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will provide the power to get there.
The civilian astronauts are two SpaceX engineers, Anna Mennon and Sarah Gillis, plus former Air Force pilot Scott “Kidd Poteet,” and Jared Isaacman, a billionaire and a jet pilot.
The four will definitely be going above the relatively radiation-safe altitude known as low-earth orbit. In fact, they will be 870 miles above the surface of the Earth. This will put them smack inside a region called Van Allen radiation belt that circles the globe. The magnetosphere mentioned above? All the radiation it deflects away from us on the ground has to go somewhere, and that’s why the Van Allen belt exists.
The information about how humans react to this level of radiation is necessary for future missions to Mars and beyond, such as SpaceX owner Elon Musk dreams about.
Only two of the crew members, Isaacman and Gillis, will actually leave the capsule and walk in space, but the entire crew will be confronted with the cold airlessness of outer space. For all its technology, the Crew Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, which means the astronauts left in the capsule will also have to wear space suits to breathe and stay warm.