This is the juicy part of the whole announcement: "the crew of Polaris Dawn will conduct a spacewalk". That's going to be a major feat and important milestone for Starship (and Dragon until then, of course).
... and since Dragon has no airlock, they will either:
(1) have to add one, (2) have actual EVA suits for all crew memebers or (3) keep the rest of the crew in their flightsuits in the vacuum inside the capsule while the hatch is open during the EVA.
If I had to guess, I would think that it is (3). This way they wouldn't have to carry a flightsuit and EVA suit for each of the crew members. The suits of the other crew members would still be connected to the capsule which takes the role of the environmental control and life support system.
> Menon: Since there is not an airlock on Crew Dragon, the whole crew will be exposed to the vacuum of space for the EVA. [1]
> Gillis: For Polaris, "the suit that we're going to be designing will be a single suit that we would launch and then similarly use for the EVA." [2]
Sounds to me like one crew member will wear the EVA suit for launch and for the EVA, and the other three will wear flight suits for launch and while the capsule is depressurised. So only one EVA suit, no changing suits in space, no airlock.
A vacuum inside a spacecraft is not necessarily cold, nor is the vacuum outside the spacecraft. Components may even begin to overheat in the absence of circulated air.
A constellation is a pattern of stars in the sky -- all of which were determined with the naked eye. Polaris is a triple star -- appearing to us as a single point of light.
There are official constellations, and then there are other shapes/patterns known as asterisms. This article will be able to explain way better than I could in a reply here.
It seems like the important thing about the 88 officially-enumerated constellations is that they divide the sky up into standardized sectors. Asterisms are just the stars themselves.
In other words, the asterism "The Big Dipper" is exactly seven stars. Since these stars are prominent, they--and some others--define the constellation "Ursa Major" but the constellation is actually the region of space around them. Thus, you could say that you can see (e.g.,) a comet "in" Ursa Major, but not "in" the Big Dipper.
SpaceX is already developing starship. Regardless of that NASA or anyone else wants they will try to make it happen for their own purposes. As part of that program there will have to be a lot of test flights. SpaceX will need to prove they can do things that NASA did decades ago like space walks.
Issacman has a lot of money and wants to be an astronaut. He is willing and able to pay SpaceX for flights. Since he has already been trained and flown in space he is also a conveniently available and willing commercial astronaut that they dont have to pay.
On top of that he brings the partnership with Saint Jude which is always good PR. Especially when people are being
So Issacman gets his dream of being an astronaut, SpaceX gets some good PR out of something they were going to do anyways. And Saint Jude gets some donations.
That about sums it up, plus you can try to get sponsors, like a monster truck event. Do a spectacle, get people to pay to put their logo on it. Many will say it is all silly, and it is, but leveraging the madness of humans to do good (and bad) things is what moves history.
I don't know why people are all that surprised really. This is what commercial space is going to look like. SpaceX isn't NASA. They aren't gifted a budget by congress to carry out their mission. They have to pay for it justify the cost with a profit somewhere a long the line. Getting sponsorships, partnerships and paying customers is all a part of that.
The age of rockets just having a flag painted on them are over. For every mission that isn't bought by the government, expect the space suits to look more like racing suits.
Think of it a joint partnership between SpaceX and Jared. Jared gets to fly in space again in a "better, higher, faster" mission and SpaceX gets a discount on in-space experimentation of their capsule and technologies they're working on. It's a win-win partnership.
The name immediately makes me think of the submarine-launched ballistic missile system that proceeded Trident [1, 2]. TBH, I was expecting the link to be to an article about the history of SLBMs.
There's apparently also an Israeli reconnaissance satellite [3] and North Korean SLBM that are referred to as Polaris [4] (plus, obviously, the star).
Why the hell would someone choose to refer to a second, unrelated, SLBM as 'Polaris'? This has the same energy as the professor who decided to write an exam question using small epsilon and large epsilon for different energies.
IMO stars names precede the weapon systems that unfortunately tarnish their name. I would view this as a chance to eradicate the unfortunate association between the star and war.
Funfact: Anna Menon's husband, Anil Menon, was recently selected in the NASA space corps. It would be fun to see if Anna Menon ends up flying before Anil Menon.
Would they be the first couple where both partners went to space?
Definitely not. For a recent example, both Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley of the first manned SpaceX Dragon crew have astronaut wives, (Megan McArthur and Karen Nyburg, respectively).
Jan Davis and Mark Lee, a married couple, both went up in 1992 on the same flight, STS-47. (I think they actually were selected prior to being married, and got married in secret during training, but I forget the exact timeline)
It's basically assured that Anna will fly before Anil. Anil's got to do 2 years of astronaut candidate training, then become an astronaut and wait for a flight slot.
Remember the epic "Navy Seal + Harvard Doctor + Astronaut" guy still hasn't flown.
Alternative title: Billionaire buys himself three new space missions.
This is obviously great for SpaceX, as Jared Isaacman will be helping to finance SpaceX's development without (as I understand it) any long term stake in the company.
The "Launching Soon" label for the Starship mission is optimistic, seeing as Starship hasn't yet reached anywhere near space but Isaacman now gets a front row seat to it's development. There are worse ways to spend your money (but arguably also better ways).
It's amazing how much negativity this gathers compared to the more typical "billionaire buys yet another super yacht" or "billionaire throws loads of money at a dubious political think tank." It seems like people hate billionaires more when they invest money in productive things vs. when they piss it away on bullshit.
I think a lot of people view the billionaire space race as just another version of them comparing super-yachts. At least with the super-yachts, nobody's pretending it's an altruistic endeavour.
Super yachts are not pushing the boundaries of what is fundamentally possible and contributing to the opening of a new frontier or building infrastructure that helps us more profoundly understand our universe.
That's a distinction people are really missing here. Super yachts aren't doing that much to push anything forward besides super yachts. Maybe a bit of interesting tech for ocean going vessels gets prototyped there but nothing anywhere close to the magnitude of what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing.
How does commercial space flight build infrastructure to help us understand the universe?
I don't think space exploration is super important at this point in our civilisational development. I get the aesthetic appeal from scifi but lack of multiplanetary life isn't really a bottleneck for us right now. So it's not all that different from flexing with yachts. I like Elon's more environment oriented projects (solarcity and tesla) but broadly speaking he's a pretty insufferable tech bro billionaire.
Commercial space flight leads to innovations and economies of scale that radically reduce the cost of accessing space, which means we can do a lot more space science for less money. Reusable rockets alone are incredible in this regard, and if Starship really flies then we will be able to put up space telescopes much larger than Hubble and JWST at significantly less cost.
Air travel was only for the rich and governments at first too, but if they hadn't funded it it would never have become cheaper.
I don't accept the "we have too many problems on Earth" argument about space, though I do understand where people are coming from. I think if we wait for major problems to be solved here, we'll never go. There will always be huge problems. That's life.
That and space is far less than 1% of global GDP. If we were spending loads of money on space people might have a point, but we spend more on porn than NASA. (Not really exaggerating... look it up...)
As for Elon being an "intolerable tech bro," I don't care. He's human. Lots of amazingly productive or innovative people also have huge personal flaws. Look at some of our favorite musicians.
It wasn't supposed to be an argument against space flight in general, but against Musk's specific arguments about "making humanity multi planetary to avoid existential risk" being one of the major things we need to be doing right now. It's no good having a few thousand people on Mars if climate collapse causes critical destabilisation of our society.
The tech bro thing isn't really about personality and more about ideology. The hyperloop and the boring company stuff is pretty dumb and clearly based on a disregard for public transit and publicly funded infrastructure, but I'm still glad he's investing in solar power and electric cars. The neuralink monkey stuff is pretty sickening too, but overall he's one of the less-bad billionaires.
> "making humanity multi planetary to avoid existential risk" being one of the major things we need to be doing right now
If not right now, then when? what should we wait for? space exploration is very hard. It takes very long time and huge investment to make any meaningful progress. Even if we start now it'd be a long time before a sustainable presence in Mars can be established.
It's also annoying to use space exploration as scapegoat for the lack of progress on Earth. You, being a HN visitor, is likely a tech savvy person who probably plays video games. Do you ever ask yourself if video games are a huge resource hog? and if we all stop playing games and devote our time and money to solve problems here on Earth, how much progress would we be able to make?
Once again, I'm not saying that space exploration isn't worthwhile - just that Elon Musk talks about it like getting established on Mars avoids a significant x-risk, where the most obvious x-risk right now is climate change. If he just said "because space exploration is cool and also advances science" then I wouldn't be critical because it wouldn't be a specious argument.
I actually rather like SpaceX but I don't like x-risk arguments from Elon the same way I don't like rationalists freaking out about AI alignment: it's such a far out risk compared to the actual one we are facing (climate change), and they wilfully ignore it because their ideology (libertarianism) has no means to address it.
What about a potential asteroid collision? If you actually check it out, there’s an asteroid flying near to earth every 2-3 years, one’s which at a minimum would wipe out a city and change the climate for hundreds of years. Are you adding that to your tail risk calculations?
We’re pretty lucky we haven’t had a major asteroid impact in over 10,000 years, some people argue that’s when it happened last and completely changed the climate.
I actually think you could legitimately argue this is larger risk than climate change, it’s just that the media don’t write about it.
What about getting resources from asteroids? Ever think about what sort of economy of abundance that could create on earth? Like some asteroids have more metals than what’s on earth. How is that for creating a better world on earth?
I think even today spacex could probably change the path of an asteroid if needed. Which is a massive amount of protection for earth. 10-20 years they can mine asteroids. So It’s not just about creating a mars colony for tech bros. It’s a million other possibilities.
You are being extremely short sighted and your judgement is clouded by not liking musks personality. His personality is the last thing you should be thinking about.
I have no issue with his personality - I have no idea who you're responding to with that point because it isn't me.
I very much doubt they could divert an asteroid right now - and if asteroid defense is the actual reason behind space innovation then why isn't anybody explicitly working on it? Because it's not profitable, and NASA's budget is pretty miniscule. Presumably if they thought it was a significant risk they'd be diverting what resources they have to asteroid defense.
My only issue with SpaceX is that Elon makes the argument that a Mars colony is somehow a counter to x-risk. It isn't, because any colony would be dependent on earth for survival for a long time and if we're worried about asteroids we should probably be defending earth instead of ditching 8 billion people and surviving with 1000 people on an inhospitable rock.
> I don't think space exploration is super important at this point in our civilisational development.
I think it's absolutely super important for our civilization's development. Right now way too many people care only about themselves. Getting people to care about the advancement of society in general is important rather than only caring about what they can personally get out of it. We won't develop as a society if we're shortsighted (shortsightedness caused global warming).
I really zoned out of the Inspiration4 mission, mainly because it's branding was "space for all" when in reality it was (and always will be) ITAR restricted, so for all really meant for Americans.
The Polaris missions here don't seem to promise that, so feels more genuine already
I don't think ITAR is the issue. There was a Japanese billionaire who wanted to do something similar with the SpaceX Starship. The passenger doesn't need to know how the ITAR restricted technology functions.
It's amusing to see that Elon Musk still hasn't admitted that the Starship program won't ever achieve the Mars mission he keeps touting (especially the original proposal of having the single ship take around a hundred human beings into orbit and then refuel and go to Mars in such a tiny vessel). At least someone is getting some use out of the vehicle and hopefully Musk will stop trying to bully his engineers too and let them do good work on the vehicle earth orbit deployments.
Based on the names of drone ships like "Yes, I Still Love You" or whatever they are called, I could see Musk calling the moonbase "That's no moon" instead of Deathstar.
This will mark a huge developmental milestone of privately funded human space flight. I don't doubt that NASA's bureaucracy slows down human spaceflight progress - but hopefully this project sticks the safety protocol. I would strongly prefer to fly on the 10th flight of starship over the first flight of Artemis.
> Congrats to @SpaceX on the announcement of their next fully private missions to space! Seeing growth in commercial spaceflight and human space exploration where @NASA is one of many customers is the future we envisioned.
I can't tell if this is fundraising or straight up bragging. "We raised $240 million for St Jude Children's Hospital" ... by spending how much? They're selling swag but that doesn't appear to have serious commercial or influence potential.
> The Polaris Program is a first-of-its-kind effort to rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities, while continuing to raise funds and awareness for important causes here on Earth
But if we're launching loads of people into space, what does the carbon footprint of that look like? How can you care for the earth if burnt rocket fuel is detrimental to the atmosphere?
> But if we're launching loads of people into space, what does the carbon footprint of that look like?
Pretty small. A 747 holds about 200 tons of fuel. A Starship holds something like 1,200. One Starship flight is roughly equivalent to six long 747 flights (as a rough estimate). Even with an absurd thousand Starship flights a day, commercial air travel far exceeds it.
A couple caveats: the 1200 figure (which is only for Starship) includes liquid oxygen. So the actual methane capacity is about 265 tons as roughly 78% of the propellant is liquid oxygen by mass. But the super heavy booster carries about 800 tons of methane.
In the long term SpaceX plans to generate it using the sabatier process by pulling CO2 out of the air. It's old physics, and the tech to do it on a large scale will be required for their ultimate goal of going to Mars (errr... well, it will be required for a Starship to be able to come back to Earth from Mars)
tl;dr: In 2018 rockets accounted for about 0.0000059% of global carbon emissions.
To put that in perspective, the airline industry produced 2.4% in 2018.
