WASHINGTON — The primary flight of the Polaris program of personal astronaut missions is now scheduled for no sooner than next April, a delay of nearly a 12 months and a half from its original plan.
In social media posts Dec. 9, Jared Isaacman, the billionaire backing the Polaris program and who’s commanding the initial mission, said the launch of Polaris Dawn is now scheduled for April 2024.
“April is the goal to launch & the pace of coaching is accelerating,” he wrote, stating that he was at SpaceX that day for testing of extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits that might be used on the mission.
Conducting a spacewalk is certainly one of the foremost goals of Polaris Dawn, requiring each development of an EVA suit in addition to modifications to the Crew Dragon, which lacks an airlock. Each of those have been challenges, he suggested in a subsequent post.
There may be a “big difference,” he wrote, between the pressure suits worn by Crew Dragon astronauts and an EVA suit “engineered from the beginning to be exposed to hoover outside the spaceship.” The shortage of an airlock also requires changes to Crew Dragon software and hardware to enable depressurization of the cabin before the beginning of the spacewalk and repressurization afterwards.
Other issues he identified include demonstrating intersatellite laser communications links between the Crew Dragon spacecraft and SpaceX’s Starlink constellation in addition to testing electronics for the upper radiation environment on the Polaris Dawn mission. The Crew Dragon will fly an orbit that can take it to altitudes of as much as 1,400 kilometers, far higher than previous Crew Dragon missions and one which brings it near the inner fringe of the Van Allen Belt.
The launch of Polaris Dawn has suffered delays of nearly a 12 months and a half. When Isaacman announced the Polaris program in February 2022, five months after he commanded the Inspiration4 private astronaut mission on a Crew Dragon, he said Polaris Dawn was scheduled to fly as soon because the fourth quarter of 2022.
That launch date has repeatedly slipped for the reason that announcement. Speaking at a conference in February, Isaacman said the mission had been rescheduled for the summer. “We’re now just months away from flying,” he said then.
By summer, though, the launch had been delayed again. Isaacman said in a CNBC podcast interview that the launch would “probably” slip to early 2024. He said the mission “should launch in the primary quarter of 2024” during a panel discussion on the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September.
Those public comments and social media posts have been the few updates the Polaris program has provided in recent months. This system’s website has not published a proper update since May. On social media, the most recent update from this system, apart from Isaacman’s comments, was a schedule of air show appearances planned for 2024.
“It’s a development program with ambitious objectives. Schedule slips ought to be expected,” Isaacman wrote Dec. 9.