For the voyage, which began Tuesday morning at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, a retired military fighter pilot, two SpaceX employees, and a millionaire businessman are donning the company’s new spacesuits and a rebuilt spacecraft.
Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, wrote about the plan last month on his social networking site X. “Crew safety is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual, as it will be the furthest humans have traveled from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spacewalk!”
There have been roughly 270 spacewalks since the International Space Station (ISS) was founded in 2000, and 16 of those spacewalks were carried out by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong.
Known as Polaris Dawn, the SpaceX mission will last approximately five days in an oval-shaped orbit that passes as close to Earth as 190 km (118 miles) and as far away as 1,400 km (870 miles), marking the furthest distance that humans have traveled since the conclusion of the Apollo lunar program in 1972.
After launch, the spacecraft will start a “two-day pre-breathe process” to get the crew ready for their spacewalk on Thursday.
