SpaceX set to launch billionaire's private crew on spacewalk mission

A crew of four private astronauts on Tuesday were in the final stages of preparation for a risky SpaceX mission to attempt the first-ever private spacewalk using the company's new spacesuits and a redesigned spacecraft.

A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot, and two SpaceX employees are poised to launch at 3:38 AM ET (0738 GMT) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, the spacecraft's fifth - and riskiest - private space mission so far.

An attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before liftoff over a small helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX's launchpad. SpaceX fixed the leak, but the company's Falcon 9 was then grounded by US regulators over a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch.

Permitted to resume Falcon 9 flights, the Polaris mission is now set for a pre-dawn launch Tuesday, but with only a 40 percent chance of favorable weather, according to US Space Force launch weather modeling. SpaceX has other launch opportunities Tuesday at 5:23 AM and 7:09 AM.

"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!" Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, wrote about the mission last month on his social media site X.

Only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have done spacewalks in the past. There have been roughly 270 on the International Space Station (ISS) since its creation in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing's Tiangong space station.

The SpaceX mission, called Polaris Dawn, will last about five days in an oval-shaped orbit that passes as close to Earth as 190 km (118 miles) and as far as 1,400 km (870 miles), the farthest any humans will have traveled since the end of the United States' Apollo moon program in 1972.

The spacewalk is planned for the mission's third day at 700 km in altitude and will last around 20 minutes. SpaceX's Crew Dragon craft will slowly depressurize its entire cabin - it has no airlock like the ISS - and all four astronauts will rely on their slimmed-down, SpaceX-built spacesuits for oxygen.

Reuters