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The Polaris Dawn crew, Anna Menon, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Jared Isaacman, and Sarah Gillis after their arrival at KSC, Aug. 19, 2024. (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Members of the Polaris Dawn mission landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) today (Aug. 19), with as little as a week until their launch to space.
Polaris Dawn is the second privately crewed SpaceX mission funded by philanthropist billionaire Jared Isaacman, and the first of at least three launches he hopes to fly under the “Polaris” program. The launch stands as a follow-up to Isaacman’s 2021 Inspiration4 mission, in which he and three other private citizens launched on the first-ever civilian-only spaceflight. Inspiration4 helped raise $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, and Isaacman hopes to build on that momentum through the trio of Polaris missions.
Beginning with Dawn, Isaacman views the Polaris program as a way to pioneer private spaceflight and demonstrate the scientific return of flying non-commissioned astronauts to space. As part of this endeavor, Isaacman and the rest of the Polaris Dawn crew will fly farther from Earth than any human has in half a century, and will undertake the first all-civilian extravehicular activity (EVA) to test out SpaceX’s new spacesuits.
The mission is poised to launch no earlier than Aug. 26 from KSC’s Launch Complex-39A. Strapped into the same Crew Dragon that launched Inspiration4, Isaacman, the mission’s commander, will ride a Falcon 9 rocket to orbit alongside fellow Polaris Dawn crewmember Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a retired United States Air Force (USAF) Lieutenant Colonel serving as mission pilot, with Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both Lead Space Operations Engineers at SpaceX — and the first employees to launch to space on one of the company’s rockets — serving as mission specialists.
Related: How SpaceX’s private Polaris Dawn astronauts will attempt the 1st-ever ‘all-civilian’ spacewalk
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The crew flew in today, piloting a small squadron of stunt jets owned by Isaacman, landing them, one by one, on the runway once used for the space shuttle’s return. After deplaning, the Polaris Dawn crew sat down with reporters at SpaceX’s Launch and Landing Facility hangar.
“Every one of these missions will be filled with a number of objectives that are meant to accelerate SpaceX’s vision to make life multiplanetary, but you can always count on — just as it is with this mission — that we will use every bit of the time available for science and research, as well as supporting St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,” Isaacman told reporters.