Artist rendering of the spacewalk on the Polaris Dawn mission
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SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission is a quantum leap forward in private spaceflight, even as it demonstrates the same capabilities that government space agencies have had for decades. The mission included the first-ever spacewalk, also known as extravehicular activity or EVA, performed by civilians rather than government-employed astronauts.
This spacewalk was particularly dangerous. Unlike the International Space Station (ISS), SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft does not have an airlock, so spacewalks require crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis to enter a vacuum. The entire capsule had to be evacuated before it could be ejected. space. Not only was there no government-trained astronaut on board, but it was the first time SpaceX’s new spacesuit and the spacecraft itself had been tested in this way.
This alone may not leave much of an impression. After all, astronauts regularly perform multi-hour spacewalks on the ISS, and have been doing so for decades. Even sending entire crew capsules into space has been done before, and was relatively common with NASA’s Gemini program in the 1960s.
So while SpaceX may be rehashing old accomplishments, that’s not all. “When you do something for the first time, it doesn’t matter if other people have already done it or not; it’s still new to you,” says Laura Folchik, an independent consultant in the space industry. “SpaceX has never done anything like this before, so we have to start from scratch and take baby steps because that’s the safe thing to do.”
Although the spacewalk on September 12th went smoothly, the astronauts did not fully escape from the capsule, leading to criticism from the media and public about its characterization as an extravehicular activity. Instead, each participant stuck their torso out of the hatch and performed a so-called “standing spacewalk” for several minutes. “What probably went wrong was communicating with the public,” Forchik said. “But this was not a public mission. This was a private mission, and there was no need to tell the public exactly what was going on or what was planned.”
The main purpose of the spacewalk was to test the new suit. New EVA suits haven’t been used for decades, and NASA’s current supply is limited and aging. “SpaceX has demonstrated that these suits are safe in microgravity. So the big question now is whether SpaceX intends to sell spacesuits to NASA,” Forczyk says. If so, this relatively simple stand-up spacewalk test could help overcome major obstacles to human spaceflight.
Apart from testing the spacesuits, the crew is also participating in a series of health experiments to determine the effects of space travel on the human body. These range from tracking bone and muscle loss during flight, a common problem for space travelers, to imaging brains and other organs shortly after explorers return to Earth.
“Civil space missions like this one can actually go a long way in advancing the study of human health during spaceflight,” said Rihana Bokhari of the Translational Space Health Institute in Texas. says. Part of the reason is that more commercial space missions generally mean more space missions, which allows researchers to collect more data.
“Another difference we run into is that these subjects are not government astronauts in the best of health. So we want more people, including civilians, to live in space and We’re collecting diverse health data sets that will help us prepare for work and create our future,” Bokhari said. .
The spacewalkers on the Polaris Dawn mission are far from ordinary people — Isaacman has been to space once before, Gillis is SpaceX’s chief astronaut instructor — but they are Of all the people who have performed extravehicular activities, they are the closest to civilians. “They risked their lives, but it worked out,” Folchik said. “SpaceX has proven it can perform the first steps in extravehicular activities, so we imagine they will continue to push boundaries and make breakthroughs.”
The spacecraft is expected to return to Earth within the next few days and splash down off the coast of Florida, followed by a series of surveys and evaluations of the travelers, capsule and suit. The next flight in SpaceX’s Polaris program is not yet planned because NASA has refused to provide service to the Hubble Space Telescope. But the company’s capabilities are growing rapidly, and it may only be a matter of time before it catches up to the government space agency that has long been the sole superpower in space.
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