Four astronauts have blasted out of the atmosphere as part of a privately funded five-day mission that aims to carry out the first commercial spacewalk.
Jared Isaacman, the American billionaire founder of the electronic payment company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris Dawn mission and acting as commander of the crew.
It is the second trip Isaacman has charted. In 2021, he flew on the Inspiration4 mission, the first orbital spaceflight by an all-civilian crew, which included a cancer survivor as well as a data engineer who won his seat in a raffle draw.
Isaacman, who has thousands of hours in various aircraft, is joined this time by a retired military fighter pilot and two employees of SpaceX, the Elon Musk-owned company that is operating the mission.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launched from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday morning after several delays. A previous attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before liftoff after a small helium leak on the launchpad. It was later pushed back further when the same make of rocket was temporarily grounded by US regulators for checks.
The trip will last about five days and take an oval-shaped orbit that travels as far as 870 miles (1,400km) from Earth’s surface.
“Crew safety is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual as it will be the furthest humans have travelled from Earth since Apollo, and the first commercial spacewalk,” Musk wrote about the mission last month on his social media site, X.
