Polaris Dawn mission launch date and details

SpaceX is preparing to launch its next private mission by the end of this month, which will include the first attempt to put astronauts in space.

Polaris Dawn Mission – First of Three Billionaire's Missions Transformation 4 The Polaris spacecraft, which SpaceX founder Jared Isaacman purchased from SpaceX in 2022 for the human spaceflight program known as the Polaris program, is scheduled to launch from Florida in the early hours of August 26.

“We don’t get a free time of day to launch but I think it will be very close to dawn, which is very appropriate given the mission,” Isaacman told CNBC’s Investing in Space during an interview last month.

Isaacman will command the mission, as he did during the historic Inspiration4 flight in 2021. He is once again leading a crew of four, with longtime colleague Scott Poteet joining him as pilot and SpaceX employees Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis as flight medical officers and mission specialists, respectively.

The multi-day journey will not be to a specific destination, but will be a free-flying mission to follow orbits that the crew hopes will take them far from Earth.

“We're going to a very high altitude that humans haven't been to in over 50 years,” Isaacman said.

But the main part of the Polaris Dawn project is the planned spacewalk.

Extravehicular activities have been a regular part of NASA astronaut missions for years, such as when the agency needs to perform maintenance outside the International Space Station. But no private company has ever attempted an extravehicular activity before.

Isaacman said he realized that going on a spacewalk would mean he and his crew would be “surrounded by death,” a moment they had been training for extensively.

“The only thing that comes close to that is a vacuum chamber, and there you feel very close to the conditions or empty space… It definitely gives you the actual sensations of pressure changes and temperature changes, as well as the psychological stress of being in a very harsh environment,” Isaacman said.

Isaacman also provided details of the daily schedule for the Polaris Dawn spacecraft, which will remain in space for up to five days.

The first day is all about finding a time when the risk of micronesian orbital debris is minimal, which will determine exactly when Polaris Dawn will launch. After reaching an orbit of 190 kilometers long and 1,200 kilometers wide, Isaacman said the crew will conduct extensive checks on SpaceX’s Dragon Resilience capsule.

“It's really important to know that the vehicle doesn't have any malfunctions before it gets to 1,400 kilometers,” Isaacman said.

The spacecraft will also make early flybys of a region of high radiation known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

“It's best to do it at the lowest possible altitude because even at 200 kilometers the radiation level is much higher there,” Isaacman said. “Two or three high-altitude passes through the South Atlantic Anomaly would be the full radiation load of the mission and the equivalent of three months on the International Space Station.”

The second day will focus on some of the science and research Polaris Dawn plans to do — which will include a total of about 40 experiments. The crew will also prepare for a spacewalk and test out the spacecraft's egress suits.

“So we can be sure that … there is nothing unexpected in zero gravity compared to what we have been able to experience on Earth,” Isaacman said.

Day 3 is the big day: EVA.

So who on the crew will be doing the spacewalk?

“We can say that all four of us do this — there is no air chamber and the air is vented into the vacuum” inside the spacecraft, Isaacman said.

Two of the crew will travel outside Dragon: Isaacman and Gillis, while Poteet and Menon will remain inside for support.

The spacewalk is expected to last about two hours from start to finish. Isaacman stressed that the spacewalk is “really a testing and development process.”

“We want to learn as much as we can about the suit and the process, but we only have a limited amount of oxygen and nitrogen to work with,” Isaacman said.

The Polaris Dawn spacecraft plans to broadcast the spacewalk live, and the mission commander confirmed that there will be “a lot of cameras” inside and outside the capsule.

The key piece of equipment to make EVA possible are SpaceX's spacesuits.

The company has spent the past two years taking the simple-looking black-and-white IVA suit — which stands for Intravehicular Activity, and which astronauts wear in emergency situations — and using it to create its own EVA suit. Isaacman said the EVA suits are the result of hundreds of hours of testing different materials over years.

“Our primary goal is to learn as much as we can about the suit,” Isaacman said.

“It’s all about building the next generation,” he added. “We continue to iterate on this suit design so that SpaceX can one day have hundreds or thousands of suits for the Moon, Mars, low Earth orbit, etc. Building a new suit for EVA is no easy task.”

Polaris Dawn aims to push the boundaries of private spaceflight, and like his first trip to orbit, Isaacman hopes this mission will be inspiring.

“That's the inspiring side of it… anything that's different from what we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years is what excites people, they think, 'Well, if this is what I see today, I wonder what it's going to look like tomorrow or in a year.'”

Read Isaacman's Q&A with CNBC's Space Investing newsletter here.