The first private spacewalk will happen this week—but is it too risky?

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Polaris Dawn launches on August 27th, and it’s the riskiest private spaceflight in history, with the first commercial space walk and the first EVA from a Crew Dragon capsule.

Let’s break down the basics: who’s going, why they’re going, what the deal with this spacewalk is (and how they’re planning on accomplishing it), and the many risks — fully venting a spacecraft with four people in it and opening the door to space, using brand new spacesuits, traveling through the Van Allen belts and radiation exposure, flying at an altitude where micrometeorites and space junk are a hazard, testing out brand new spacesuits — the list goes on and on and ON.

Polaris Dawn: An Overview

• Here’s what to know about the flight

• The schedule and spacewalk

• The many, many risks of Polaris Dawn

• But wait — there’s precedent for this!

• A brand new spacesuit and the spacecraft mods

• So, then, what about the crew training?

Here’s what to know about the flight

This flight is part of the Polaris Program, which is three private spaceflights in partnership with SpaceX, funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. Polaris Dawn is the first of these flights (the final flight will be the first crewed launch of Starship). This launch is scheduled for Tuesday, August 27, at 3:38 am ET (that’s 0738 GMT), from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral, FL. The launch window is four hours long, and there are two backup launch opportunities.

I know a lot of people don’t like private spaceflight, and that’s fine, you don’t have to. But I think this mission is really interesting because it’s not your typical space tourist mission. As an aside, this is the series of missions that was potentially going to service and boost the Hubble Space Telescope. Jared Isaacman offered to do it at no cost to NASA, but at the end of the day, NASA was worried about Polaris astronauts damaging the observatory, so they are not moving forward with that mission.

These flights conduct experiments on-orbit, raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital, and the flights are designed to push the boundaries of private human spaceflight — which makes sense that the first EVA, or extravehicular activity, from a private spacecraft would be part of this mission. It may seem risky (and it is — I’ll get into that) but someone has to be first, and they’re volunteering (or in Isaacman’s case, probably paying through the nose). The astronauts go through extensive training, which I’ll get into.

And Isaacman himself is the commander of the mission, lest you think the billionaire is risking other people’s lives. This will be his second spaceflight after 2021’s first all-civilian space mission, Inspiration4. SpaceX also has two employees aboard Polaris Dawn: Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon who are both Lead Space Operations Engineers at SpaceX. Sarah Gillis oversees SpaceX’s astronaut training program (she trains the NASA crews), while Anna Menon runs SpaceX Mission Control and manages the development of crew operations (she used to work at NASA supporting astronauts, and her husband is a NASA astronaut). Pilot Scott Poteet, nicknamed “Kidd” is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force. All crew members have undergone over two years of training for this mission.

The schedule and spacewalk

The mission is scheduled for 5 days.

Falcon 9 will drop it off in a lower orbit, and the crew will put the Crew Dragon through its paces. This is a previously flown Dragon, used in fact for Inspiration4. They’re going to do some orbital maneuver — raising the orbit to 1,400 km will be the furthest humans have traveled since the moon landings.

Then they’ll drop back down. That 700 km orbit is where they’ll remain for the rest of their flight, as well as the altitude they will conduct their space walk.

Let’s talk about the spacewalk. They will fully vent the air from Crew Dragon after all four crew members don spacesuits. Two will exit the spacecraft, while two will stay inside. They’re going to test out maneuverability and really try and put these new suits through their paces to see how they perform. The entire endeavor is scheduled for about two hours, but the time spent outside the vehicle will likely be just 15 to 20 minutes. They do recognize the risks and want to mitigate them as much as possible — that includes not spending unnecessary time outside the spacecraft. This will happen on flight day 3, but they’ll spend time on days 1 and 2 preparing for it.

They will spend the rest of the time — when they’re not maneuvering, prepping, space walking, or testing, that is — conducting around 40 science and research experiments. (There are a lot of cool experiments to be clear but the one I’m most interested in — as a supporter of human spaceflight and a fan of science fiction — is artificial gravity. Basically using spinning to create artificial gravity also creates severe motion sickness. But that might be mitigated in space, and that’s one thing that the Polaris Dawn crew members will be testing.)

The crew will also be testing out what’s called Starlink LaserLink, which basically is an experiment that uses beams of light to communicate with Starlink satellites. If it’s successful this could be a new way for SpaceX vehicles, satellites, telescopes, all kinds of things to communicate with Earth (assuming they’re willing to pay for Starlink.)

The many, many risks of Polaris Dawn

I’m not going to pretend this isn’t risky. They’re using brand new EVA suits that have never been tested in space. In order to do this spacewalk, they have to all don these suits and depressurize the entire Crew Dragon spacecraft because there is no airlock. I talked to Dr. Dan Buckland, a space medicine researcher at Duke University, and he pointed out to me that this might also be the first four-person spacewalk in history (because even though only two people are spacewalking, and only one will exit the hatch, they’re all four functionally doing the EVA).

Space is notoriously hard to maneuver in, and none of these astronauts have ever done an EVA. Only one has ever flown in space, Jared Isaacman. There’s a lot going on here, and as I discussed in my previous video on NASA’s evaluation of risk for Boeing Starliner, space is inherently risky because it’s actively trying to kill you. And they’re going to open the door and let it into the capsule.

Not to mention that this flight will be the furthest away humans have been from the Earth since the end of Apollo (and the furthest any woman has been from the Earth ever). They won’t be at their highest altitude for long, but that environment has a much higher incidence of space debris and micrometeorites.

And if that’s not enough? There’s the increased radiation risk. Polaris Dawn will orbit through the inner parts of the Van Allen belts which are zones of energetic charged particles surrounding the Earth. Basically, the Earth’s magnetosphere traps radiation from solar storms, cosmic rays, solar wind in these belts. But to explore the solar system, we need to know how to safely travel through these belts. Polaris Dawn will be oriented to minimize the astronauts’ radiation exposure, but also the data they’ll gather will be important.

But wait — there’s precedent for this!

If this sounds absolutely bizarre and way too risky, just remember: The astronauts know it’s a risk. Dr. Buckland said to me something really interesting — “A government mission has to consider appropriate use of taxpayer funds and NASA astronauts as federal employees can't actually accept some kinds of individual risk due to employment rules; it has to be accepted on their behalf by NASA. On the other hand, private missions don't have those limitations. The Polaris Dawn crewmembers, as private citizens, can, if properly informed of the risk, accept whatever they feel comfortable with, same with SpaceX.”

And we have done this kind of EVA before. On the ISS when astronauts do spacewalks, there are airlocks. These allow astronauts to venture outside Space Station without having to expose the entire ISS to the near-vacuum of space. The Space Shuttle also had an airlock on its mid-deck. But that hasn’t always been the case.

The first spacewalk ever came from cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in March 1965, but the Soviet spacecraft had airlocks. The U.S.’s didn’t. There were spacewalks without an airlock on Gemini 4, 9-12, Apollo 9, and on all of the successful lunar landing missions. The lunar module was fully depressurized when the astronauts ventured out onto the surface of the moon.

A brand new spacesuit and the spacecraft mods

There is QUITE A BIT of precedent here. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of risk, so let’s talk about the spacesuits, the spacecraft, and the TRAINING.

This is the first time that crew members will don the first-generation EVA suit (not to be confused with SpaceX’s launch and entry suit, though they look similar.) These pressure suits are notoriously hard to move in (they become rigid when pressurized to protect the human body from space), so it will really be interesting to see the reports on how these work — especially because SpaceX completely re-designed the joints from the ground up to make them more mobile. There’s also a heads-up display, helmet camera, thermal insulation, solar protection, all of it.

Interestingly, because of the way SpaceX develops things (in an iterative way), they couldn’t test the spacesuit in a pool, like NASA does with the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. Instead, they tested this on a suspension system they designed, and I’m very curious to see reports on how well that works as compared to the Neutral Buoyancy Lab.

There were also modifications made to this Crew Dragon for the EVA. SpaceX had to significantly increase the life support capacity to be able to supply the four suits with oxygen. They’ve also upgraded the sensors within the spacecraft to be able to better monitor conditions before depressurizing the hatch, during exposure to space, and after everyone’s come back in. SpaceX also added a motor assist to the hatch to help with opening.

There’s also a nitrogen repress system to help repressurize the spacecraft after the EVA, as well as mobility aids to make sure the crew members can move around in the spacecraft in their suits. SpaceX also added handholds and footholds outside the forward hatch, as well as new cameras—so hopefully we’ll have a good view, thanks to the Starlink experiment on board (because of course the entire thing will be livestreamed).

They have tested all of this fully, in a vacuum chamber, to make sure it works.

So, then, what about the crew training?

This crew has been working together for the last two and a half years, developing the spacesuit, in simulators, figuring out protocols for pre-breathing air before the spacewalk to reduce the risk of decompression sickness. They spent hundreds of hours in simulators, hundreds of hours in suits. A lot of the training they underwent is taken from what NASA does with their astronauts — a centrifuge, human-rated altitude chambers, scuba diving, medical training, mountain climbing, skydiving — the list goes on and on.

If you’re wondering WHY Jared Isaacman wants to do this? Well, he has made it clear that he wants to further human exploration into the solar system. To do that, we need to know how humans do at this kind of orbit, in this kind of radiation environment. NASA is doing amazing work, but some people think that it’s not enough — NASA is very limited by its budgets, and they couldn’t do a mission like this right now. But Isaacman, in paying for this privately, wants to further our knowledge and experience with spaceflight.

You may think it’s too risky, and it is VERY risky. But the fact is everything needs a test flight, and this is it. They think it’s worth it.

As Dr. Buckland told me, “As a space medicine researcher I am glad private citizens and private companies are trying new things so I can get more data points on how humans who haven't gone through NASA astronaut selection and training deal with the hazards of space, and as a taxpayer I'm glad that I'm not funding it.”