A crew of astronauts are in the final stages of preparation for a risky SpaceX mission to attempt the first-ever private spacewalk.
Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, commander Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, crew members of Polaris Dawn , a private human spaceflight mission, attend a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, earlier this week. Joe Skipper/Reutersprivate astronauts on Tuesday were in the final stages of preparation for a risky SpaceX mission to attempt the first-ever private spacewalk using the company’s new spacesuits and a redesigned spacecraft.
“Crew safety is absolutely paramount, and this mission carries more risk than usual as it will be the furthest humans have travelled from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spacewalk,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, wrote about the mission last month on his social media site X. The first US spacewalk was in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, and used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurised, the hatch opened and a space-suited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.
The four-person crew are effectively test subjects for an array of scientific experiments that will aim to shed light on how cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space affect the human body, adding to decades of studies on astronauts living aboard the ISS.
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