SpaceX Tests Dragon EVA In A First For Private Flight

Through the recently completed Polaris Dawn private charter and spacewalk, SpaceX demonstrated the ability to develop, build and flight-test a growing range of technologies while gaining operational expertise for missions in low Earth orbit and beyond.

Even by SpaceX’s ebullient schedules, the company’s ultimate goal of landing people on Mars is years away. But having a paying customer—especially one with a penchant for test piloting—has proved to be motivational and productive in developing technologies for future applications. “We made some progress here,” Polaris Dawn Mission Commander and financier Jared Isaacman tells Aviation Week. “And the nice thing was it was privately funded.

• Spacesuits and Starlink are tested during a five-day flight
• Dragon sets altitude record for Earth-orbiting crewed spacecraft

“The Space Race [of the 1960s]—as impressive as it was and inspiring for all of us—was 4.5% of the GDP,” he explains. “Taxpayers put a lot of money behind that. There is no profit motive for going to Mars. We might not stand to gain anything economically at all, other than just maybe another place to kind of plant the flag of human consciousness. That’s OK, and the fact that it’s being funded by individuals instead of taxpayers is great. This is all in the spirit of progress.”

The Sept. 10-15 Polaris Dawn mission was Isaacman’s second flight with SpaceX; two more are under contract. Like his September 2021 Inspiration4 mission, Polaris Dawn took place aboard the Crew Dragon Resilience, one of four operational capsules in SpaceX’s current fleet. A fifth capsule is expected to debut next year.

“Inspiration4 was about ‘Can this [private spaceflight] be done?’ ” Isaacman says. “Dragon was built for NASA. There are a lot of capabilities in it, and there’s a lot to learn. We needed to show it could be done safely.”

Following Inspiration4, which marked SpaceX’s first private charter, Isaacman unveiled the Polaris program—a trio of technology demonstration flights expected to culminate with a crewed flight test of SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship-Super Heavy transport.

Isaacman had hoped the inaugural Polaris Dawn would fly in late 2022, but developing spacesuits, hardware and procedures for an extravehicular activity (EVA) proved more challenging than expected. Isaacman and his handpicked crew—including two SpaceX employees who had spearheaded training and mission operations for Inspiration4—spent the next 2.5 years preparing for the flight.

Isaacman said that one of the only things the crew did not plan for was an extended two-week quarantine while they waited for a stable patch of weather that would last long enough for a splashdown off the Florida coast five days after launch. Polaris Dawn was a free-flying mission with limited commodities onboard, making suitable landing conditions a criterion for launch.

Isaacman and his crew got their shot at 5:23 a.m. EDT Sept. 10. After a smooth countdown, their SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A. After 12 min. 16 sec., the Falcon’s upper stage deposited the Dragon capsule into an initial orbit range of 118-746 mi. above Earth. Before day’s end, the Dragon boosted its apogee by another 124 mi., besting the 1966 Gemini 11 record for the highest-altitude crewed flight in Earth orbit.

That record was a personal goal of Isaacman’s as well as an opportunity for SpaceX to study the performance of the Dragon’s avionics and other systems in a higher-radiation environment than the ships experience during cargo and crew runs to the International Space Station, which orbits about 262 mi. above Earth.

“We obviously went very high, but we also went very low,” Isaacman says. “Our perigee was 190 km [118 mi.], and at one point, we were down to about 175 km from atmosphere drag, and even the EVA venting lowered perigee a little bit. When we were at perigee, you could see contrails from the airliners and the dot of an airplane that was creating the contrails. You could see the definition of farms on the ground. You could see civilization at work.

“Then within about 45 min. you’re back to the big, beautiful sphere, with a big outline of black space around it,” he notes. “It was so much more than Inspiration4, where we were just under 600 km. It was quite a different sight.”

The highlight of the mission came on Sept. 12, when SpaceX depressurized the Dragon capsule for what became the first civilian EVA. The Dragon has no airlock, so the entire capsule was exposed to the vacuum of space, requiring all four Polaris Dawn crewmembers to don spacesuits created by SpaceX for the mission.

Mission pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet—a retired U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and Isaacman’s longtime collaborator—and SpaceX Lead Space Operations Engineer Anna Menon remained strapped in their seats while Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, SpaceX’s lead astronaut trainer, took turns positioning themselves on a scaffolding structure bolted onto the capsule’s forward hatch for a 7-8 min. series of spacesuit mobility checks.

The spacewalkers remained tethered to the inside of the capsule and on Dragon power and cooling systems throughout the exercise. Previous plans to float freely in space—similar to Gemini astronaut Ed White’s historic first U.S. spacewalk in 1965—were nixed for safety and operational reasons.

The EVA suits are based on the pressurized spacesuits that Dragon crews wear during launch and reentry. They are designed to provide greater mobility and include a helmet with a head-up display and camera, advanced thermal management textiles and materials borrowed from the Falcon’s interstage and the Dragon’s trunk.

The rest of the mission focused on research experiments, tests of a new laser link with SpaceX’s Starlink network and public outreach activities, including a violin performance by Gillis, a trained musician, of Star Wars composer John Williams’ “Rey’s Theme.” Her crewmates recorded the performance, which was then broadcast with young accompanists in Brazil, Haiti, Sweden, Venezuela, Uganda and the U.S. The violin will be auctioned off as part of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Isaacman’s chosen charity partner.

At 2:40 a.m. EDT on Sept. 15, the Dragon fired braking rockets for about 7 min. to slow its speed and drop out of orbit. The spacecraft’s two drogue chutes deployed at an altitude of about 18,000 ft. to dissipate speed and steady the ship. A minute later, four main parachutes unfurled, setting the stage for a gentle splashdown at 3:36 a.m. off the coast of Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX had activated the new site, located 76 mi. west of Key West, to better the odds of a suitable location for landing, given the weather issues that delayed the launch.

Isaacman declines to say if he did any manual piloting of the Dragon in orbit. “Dragon has some impressive automation or autopilot, and it also has a lot of manual capabilities to be used in a contingency or an emergency, and we checked out all of these systems appropriately,” he says. “I can’t really comment more than that.”

Isaacman and SpaceX pitched a proposal to NASA to have the next Polaris mission boost the Hubble Space Telescope and possibly perform other services. NASA declined the offer but kept the door open for future consideration.

Plans for that flight will come after the Polaris program and SpaceX vet the full results and lessons learned from Polaris Dawn.

“The second mission was always meant to build on the first,” Isaacman says. “What you saw was a 1.0 EVA suit. No one would ever tout it as the most complex EVA in history. It was basic, much more akin to the ’60s, but it was a step in the right direction.

“It would be incredibly surprising if you didn’t see us do a much more complex EVA on the next go with a generational leap ahead in suit technology,” he adds. “My hope is that we just continue at the same pace, if not faster.”