SpaceX wants to put astronauts into a particularly high orbit around the Earth for the first time today (9:38 a.m. CET). On the “Polaris Dawn” mission, planned for a maximum of five days, the four crew members will travel up to 700 kilometers from Earth after taking off from Cape Canaveral Spaceport. According to SpaceX, this is the farthest distance humans have traveled to Earth since the last Apollo missions to the moon in the early 1970s. For comparison: the International Space Station (ISS) is located at an altitude of about 400 kilometers.
Billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who organized the mission with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is piloting Polaris Dawn. Along with Isaacman, astronauts Cade Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon will fly into space in the Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
The mission will also include the first spacewalk for astronauts, as the private space company wants to test a new spacesuit for extravehicular operations. The suit is intended to provide greater mobility during “the first commercial spacewalk,” the project’s website says. It also features a helmet-mounted display, a camera and new materials to improve thermoregulation in the cold of space.
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