Privately funded five-day mission blasts off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule, carrying the crew of the Polaris Dawn Mission, lifts off at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Photograph: Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty ImagesFour astronauts have blasted out of the atmosphere as part of a privately funded five-day mission that aims to carry out the first commercial spacewalk.
Mr Isaacman, who has thousands of hours in various aircraft, is joined this time by a retired military fighter pilot and two employees of SpaceX, theFalcon 9 rocket launched from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on Tuesday morning after several delays. A previous attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before lift-off after a small helium leak on the launch pad. It was later pushed back further when the same make of rocket was temporarily grounded by US regulators for checks.
Polaris Dawn will travel to an altitude of 1,400km, attempt the first commercial spacewalk from Dragon, test Starlink-laser based communications, and conduct a wide range of research in microgravity before returning to Earth and splashing down off the coast of Florida pic.twitter.com/X4kGksg3Rd – SpaceX September 10, 2024
SpaceX’s crewed missions are part of Mr Musk’s plan to take astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars, which it has plans to “colonise”. The company is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, called Starship, and has carried out four test flights of the 120-metre-tall system.
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