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ELON Musk’s SpaceX is set to attempt the first-ever private spacewalk in a historic moment for space travel.
The Polaris Dawn crew is prepared to step into the vacuum of space around 400 miles above the Earth after blasting into orbit on Tuesday.
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It will be the first time in history that a group of amateur astronauts will attempt a spacewalk and the furthest humans have travelled from Earth in over 50 years.
The Polaris Dawn crew will do it without the usual training, from a space capsule while testing a new line of spacesuits.
The newly developed SpaceX suits are equipped with heads-up displays, helmet cameras, and advanced joint mobility systems.
The team have been orbiting Earth aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon since their pre-dawn launch from from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday.
It reached a peak altitude of 870 miles more than three times higher than the International Space Station
The elite group consists of mission commander billionaire Jared Isaacman, 41, retired military fighter pilot Scott Poteet, 50, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38.
Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft tethered by an oxygen line while Poteet and Menon will stay inside the cabin.
The duo will take turns peeking out from a hatch structure dubbed “Skywalker.”
“It’ll look like we’re doing a little bit of a dance,” Isaacman said during a recent press conference.
“What they’re actually doing is stress testing their next-generation suit to inform future design evolution.”
Since the Crew Dragon capsule lacks an airlock, the entire crew will be exposed to the vacuum of space for around two hours.
They will also conduct 38 science experiments to study the effects of spaceflight and space radiation on human health.
All four underwent more than two years of training in preparation for the landmark mission, logging hundreds of hours on simulators as well as skydiving, centrifuge training, scuba diving, and summiting an Ecuadoran volcano.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.
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