4 civilians prepare for the riskiest SpaceX mission to date
CBC
Next Monday, if all goes to plan, a four-person crew will blast off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard a SpaceX rocket, on their way to making history.
Funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman, the five-day mission has several scientific goals, but the biggest and undoubtedly riskiest one is the first commercial spacewalk.
"Whatever risk associated with it, it's worth it," said Isaacman during a press conference on Monday.
It's the first in-flight test of SpaceX's sleek new extravehicular (EVA) spacesuit, based off its intravehicular one.
But this spacewalk will be quite different from those with which we're most familiar. The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule doesn't have an airlock, so the entire spacecraft will be depressurized, with all four crew members testing the new suits.
The crew consists of Isaacman, CEO of Shift4, a payment processing company based out of Pennsylvania; Scott "Kidd" Poteet, a former air force colonel; Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer and astronaut trainer; and Anna Menon, another SpaceX engineer who also serves in mission control.
The launch is scheduled for no earlier than Aug. 26 at 3:30 a.m. ET.
It will be Isaacman and Gillis who will conduct the spacewalk 700 kilometres above Earth three days into the mission.
"EVA is a risky adventure. But again, we did all the work to really get ready for this," said Bill Gerstenmaier, who was head of NASA's human spaceflight until 2020. He is now an engineer at SpaceX.
The mission has been two-and-a-half years in the making.
"We kind of built off of what NASA's heritage was, but I think we've also extended NASA's heritage a little bit further," he said.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk has the ultimate goal of colonizing Mars, so the spacesuits are a necessary step.
"It's not lost on us that, you know, it might be 10 iterations from now and a bunch of evolutions of the suit but that someday someone could be wearing a version of which that might be walking on Mars," Isaacman said. "And [it's] a huge honour to have that opportunity, to test it out on this flight."
Emmanuel Urquieta, vice-chair of aerospace medicine at the University of Central Florida, said there is a lot of history to support this historic spacewalk.
