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Tag: Private spaceflight

  • Watch Live as SpaceX Attempts Historic Launch of First Private Spacewalk Mission

    Watch Live as SpaceX Attempts Historic Launch of First Private Spacewalk Mission

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    A billionaire and his three crew members hope to make history as they prepare to get shot into space on a mission that is planned to include the first-ever civilian spacewalk.

    The Polaris Dawn team will launch aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon, with a Falcon 9 rocket performing the lifting duties. Blast off is scheduled to take place at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 3:38 a.m. ET on Tuesday, August 27. Should SpaceX need to postpone the launch, the company said on its website there are two backup times that morning, one at 5:23 a.m. and the other at 7:09 a.m. If a launch during those times is impossible, the launch could take place during the following morning.

    The launch will be livestreamed starting 3.5 hours before liftoff on the SpaceX website, and via X.

    If Polaris Dawn proceeds as planned, the Crew Dragon capsule is expected to reach a maximum orbit of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) above Earth. This would not only mark the highest altitude a Dragon capsule has reached but also set a new record for the highest Earth orbit apogee. The current record, held by the 1966 Gemini XI mission, is 853 miles (1,373 kilometers). While the Apollo missions traveled much farther to reach the Moon, they did not achieve such high altitudes while orbiting Earth.

    The crew plans to stay in orbit for up to five days, during which they will conduct over 30 research studies and experiments. These include gathering data on radiation conditions in space and conducting several experiments related to human survival in space. For the centerpiece of the mission, the capsule will lower its orbit to 435 miles (700 km) above Earth, where two of the four crew members will participate in the first-ever spacewalk conducted by private citizens. Previously, all spacewalks had been carried out by astronauts from government space agencies.

    If all goes well, the spacewalk will be just one of several firsts. Polaris Dawn will include the inaugural deployment of SpaceX’s extravehicular activity (EVA) space suit. And as the Crew Dragon capsule does not have an airlock, all four crew members will be exposed to the vacuum of space, meaning the EVA’s success during the spacewalk is critical not only as a test of its viability, but to the survival of the entire crew.

    SpaceX unveiled the EVA suit in May after years of delays, and is a modification of the space company’s intravehicular activity suit. It was designed with enhanced mobility for astronauts in mind and includes 3D-printed helmets to reduce glare from the Sun while the wearer is outside their vehicle, as well as a state-of-the-art heads-up display and camera. The suit was also designed to be scaled up for different body types, allowing for mass production.

    The crew will also be the first to test out Starlink’s laser-based communications in space. According to SpaceX, the goal is to develop the system for use in missions to the Moon and Mars “and beyond.”

    Among Polaris Dawn’s crew members is the person funding the mission. Jared Isaacman is serving as mission commander, but is best known as the billionaire CEO of payment processing firm Shift4. Isaacman previously went to space aboard Inspiration4, the first all-civilian trip to orbit. Along with the rest of the Polaris Dawn crew, he has spent the past two years training for the mission. Alongside Polaris Dawn, Isaacson is paying SpaceX an undisclosed amount for two more Polaris missions, the final of which is hoped to be the first crewed mission aboard SpaceX’s Starship reusable transport system. No launch dates have been announced for the follow-up missions.

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    Adam Kovac

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  • The Odysseus Lander Is Tipped Over on Its Side on the Moon

    The Odysseus Lander Is Tipped Over on Its Side on the Moon

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    Intuitive Machines’ private lander stumbled on its way down to the lunar surface and is possibly leaning over on a rock on the Moon. The vehicle is still operational and flight engineers are working to gather more data on its less than ideal position, the company said.

    China’s Plan to Land Astronauts on the Moon

    Odysseus landed on the Moon on Thursday, overcoming a glitch that jeopardized its ability to safely touch down. Although it made it to the surface, Odie’s landing was not so smooth, with the vehicle getting one of its legs caught, causing it to tip over on its side and possibly end up laying on a rock, Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus revealed during a press conference on Friday.

    “Yesterday we thought we were upright,” Altemus said. “When we worked through the night to get other telemetry data, we noticed that in this direction [pointing downwards] is where we’re seeing the tank residuals and so that’s what tells us with fairly certain terms the orientation of the vehicle.”

    Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus explaining the orientation of the vehicle.
    Screenshot: NASA TV

    “It was a quite a spicy seven-day mission to get to the Moon,” Altemus added, and he is not wrong. Intuitive Machines was racing to the lunar surface to become the first private company to land on the Moon following a series of failures by others. In January, Astrobotic failed in its attempt to reach the Moon due to a valve issue with its Peregrine spacecraft. In April 2023, Japan’s ispace Hakuto-R M1 crashed on the lunar surface, and Israel’s SpaceIL Beresheet lander met a similar fate in April 2019.

    This time around, the Moon still put up a fight. Just hours before its scheduled descent, Odysseus’ laser rangefinders, which are designed to assess the Moon’s terrain to identify a safe landing spot, malfunctioned. In order to help guide the lander to the surface, flight engineers uploaded a software patch to repurpose a secondary laser on a NASA instrument that’s on board Odysseus.

    The Houston-based company seemingly broke the lunar curse with Thursday’s touchdown, despite it not being entirely perfect. With the lander on its side, it is still receiving sunlight to its horizontal solar panel, and all of its active payloads are facing away from the surface and could therefore be able to operate from the Moon, according to Altemus.

    Intuitive Machines secured a faint signal from its lander but it is still waiting on more data to be downlinked from Odysseus. Some of the antennas that the lander is designed to use to communicate with Earth, however, are pointed downward, which limits the mission’s ability to transmit data.

    The IM-1 mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, which aims to have a constant flow of private landers headed to the Moon to deliver government-owned and commercial payloads. With each private trip that launches to the Moon, NASA and its partner companies collect data to feed into the next mission.

    “As landers come down, we would ideally like to have them come straight down,” Prasun Desai, deputy associate administrator of Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA, said during the press conference. “But because there’s errors in the operations of the system, you wind up going laterally…[we’re trying to] get an understanding of that lateral movement so that the system can counteract that and zero out that lateral motion to come straight down.”

    Odysseus is designed to operate on the lunar surface for around a week, or until the Sun sets on the Moon’s south polar region. Intuitive Machines is hoping that the lander’s solar panels will be able to receive enough sunlight in their current position to power the lander through the coming days.

    For more spaceflight in your life, follow us on X (formerly Twitter) and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.

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    Passant Rabie

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