Month: May 2024

Enlarge / The crew of Polaris Dawn from L to R: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman, and Sarah Gillis. (credit: John Kraus/Polaris Program)

Over the weekend the crew of the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission shared a wealth of details about the intriguing private mission that will send humans farther than they have flown from Earth in half a century.

Commanded and funded by private astronaut Jared Isaacman, the mission seeks to test new technologies that will further the expansion of humanity into space. Among the objectives are pushing the performance of the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, performing the first commercial spacewalk in a new spacesuit developed by SpaceX, and testing Starlink laser-based communications in space.

"Our first objective is to travel farther from the Earth and the last time humans walked on the Moon with Apollo 17, more than 50 years ago," Isaacman said during an online chat hosted by the social network site X. "So we target an apogee of 1,400 kilometers. That puts us just inside the Van Allen radiation belt. It's an awesome opportunity for us to get some data, but really it's about pushing beyond our comfort zone."

Enlarge / The Atlas V rocket and Starliner spacecraft on their launch pad Monday. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams climbed into their seats inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft Monday night in Florida, but trouble with the capsule's Atlas V rocket kept the commercial ship's long-delayed crew test flight on the ground.

Around two hours before launch time, shortly after 8:30 pm EDT (00:30 UTC), United Launch Alliance's launch team stopped the countdown. "The engineering team has evaluated, the vehicle is not in a configuration where we can proceed with flight today," said Doug Lebo, ULA's launch conductor.

The culprit was a misbehaving valve on the rocket's Centaur upper stage, which has two RL10 engines fed by super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.