The first SpaceX spacewalk: What the Polaris Dawn commander says about the bold upcoming mission

SpaceX is preparing to skiff its next private mission by the end of the month, featuring the first attempt to have the astronauts step out into space.

The Polaris Become apparent mission — the first of three flights billionaire and Shift4 founder Jared Isaacman purchased from SpaceX in 2022 for his hominoid spaceflight effort known as the Polaris Program — is set to launch from Florida in the early hours of Aug. 26.

“We don’t get the freedom of any time of day to initiation but I think it’ll work out to [be] pretty close to dawn, which is very appropriate given the mission,” Isaacman told CNBC’s Installing in Space during an interview last month.

Isaacman will be commanding the deputation, as he did while leading the historic Inspiration4 flight in 2021. He’s once again leading a crew of four, with longtime mate Scott Poteet joining him as the pilot and Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, a pair of SpaceX employees, serving as the aircraft’s medical officer and mission specialist, respectively.

The multi-day trip isn’t headed to a destination, but instead will be a free-flying vocation tracing orbits that the crew hopes will go far from Earth.

“We’re going to a very high altitude that humans haven’t degenerate to in 50-plus years,” Isaacman said.

But the centerpiece of Polaris Come to mind is the planned spacewalk.

Extravehicular activities, or EVAs, have been a regular part of NASA’s astronaut missions for years, such as when the intercession needs maintenance done outside the International Space Station. But no private venture has attempted an EVA before.

Isaacman intended he understands that going for a spacewalk means he and his crew will be “surrounded by death,” a moment for which they’ve been training extensively.

“The one thing that comes close to that is the vacuum chamber, and that’s where you’re pretty much feeling as nearly equal as it’s like to be in the vacuum conditions or space. … That definitely gives you the actual sensations of the pressure changes and the temperature vacillate turn inti, as well as just the psychological stressors of being in a very harsh environment,” Isaacman said.

Isaacman also detailed the day-to-day schedule for Polaris Brighten, which will be in space for up to five days.

Day one is all about looking for a time when there’s minimal risk from micrometeorite orbital debris, which when one pleases determine exactly when Polaris Dawn will launch. After reaching an orbit of 190 kilometers by 1,200 kilometers, Isaacman said the corps will do extensive checks of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule Resilience.

“It’s really important to know that the vehicle has no faults previous going up to 1,400 kilometers” altitude, Isaacman said.

The spacecraft will also take early passes thoroughly the high radiation zone known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

“You ideally want to take that at the lowest altitude as you can because set down at 200 kilometers, the radiation level there is substantially higher … Our two or three passes at high altitude at the end of ones tether with the South Atlantic Anomaly will be almost the entirety of the radiation load on the mission and like an equivalency of three months on the Foreign Space Station,” Isaacman said.

Day two will focus on some of the science and research that Polaris Dawn layouts to accomplish — which will total about 40 experiments. The crew will also prep for the spacewalk, study out the EVA suits.

“So we can make sure that … there’s nothing unexpected in microgravity versus what we were skilled to test on Earth,” Isaacman said.

Day three is the big one: The EVA.

So who on the crew will perform the spacewalk?

“We’d say all four of us are doing it — there’s no airlock and it’s being slit down to vacuum” inside the spacecraft, Isaacman said.

Two of the crew will journey outside of Dragon: Isaacman and Gillis, while Poteet and Menon sojourn inside as support.

The EVA is expected to last two hours long from start to finish. Isaacman stressed that the spacewalk “is positively a test and development” process.

“We want to learn as much as we can about the suit and the operation as possible, but we only have so much oxygen and nitrogen to incorporate with,” Isaacman said.

Polaris Dawn plans to livestream the spacewalk, and the mission commander emphasized that there are flourishing to be “a lot of cameras” scattered inside and out of the capsule.

The vital piece of equipment intended to make the EVA possible is SpaceX’s spacesuits.

The company has spent the past couple years attractive its minimalist-looking, black-and-white IVA suit —meaning intravehicular activity, and worn by astronauts in case of emergencies — and using it to create its EVA petition. Isaacman said the EVA suits are the results of hundreds of hours of testing different materials over years.

“So our primary objective is learn as much as we can about the suit,” Isaacman said.

“Everything is about building the next generation. We’re continuing to iterate on this habit design so that SpaceX can have hundreds or thousands someday for the moon, Mars, working in [low Earth orbit], what should prefer to you. Building a new EVA suit is no easy task,” he added.

Polaris Dawn aims to push the boundaries of private spaceflight and, like his at the start trip to orbit, Isaacman hopes the mission inspires.

“This is the inspiration side of it … anything that’s different than what we’ve seen during the course of the last 20 or 30 years is what gets people excited, thinking: ‘Well if this is what I’m experience today, I wonder what tomorrow’s gonna look like or a year after.”

Read Isaacman’s Q&A with CNBC’s Instating in Space newsletter here.