Spaceflight Now

Update: Splashdown occurred at 3:37 a.m. EDT (0737 UTC)

The Polaris Dawn crew closed out a record-setting commercial spaceflight and packed up Saturday for re-entry and a pre-dawn splashdown early Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico northwest of Key West, Florida.

Flying along a southwest-to-northeast trajectory, the Crew Dragon capsule, carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman, pilot Scott Poteet and company engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, is expected to fire its braking rockets at 2:40 a.m. EDT Sunday to drop out of orbit.

Plunging back into the discernible atmosphere, the Crew Dragon’s protective heat shield will endure temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit before the ship slows enough to deploy its parachutes. Splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico near Dry Tortugas, Florida, is expected around 3:36 a.m.

A SpaceX recovery ship was stationed nearby to recover the capsule and help the crew members out of the spacecraft for routine post-landing medical checks before a helicopter flight to shore and reunions with family and friends.

The Polaris Dawn mission, financed by Isaacman in cooperation with SpaceX, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center atop a Falcon 9 rocket early Tuesday. Right off the bat, the crew set a new altitude record for a piloted spacecraft in Earth orbit, reaching a high point, or apogee, of 875 miles.

That’s farther from Earth than anyone has flown since the final Apollo voyage to the moon in 1972.

Early Thursday, the crew set another record when Isaacman and Gillis took turns floating just outside the capsule’s hatch in the first non-government spacewalk ever conducted.

“Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman marveled, taking in a spectacular view of the borderless planet below as he floated into open space just outside the Crew Dragon’s hatch.

The goal of the brief excursions was to test the SpaceX-designed pressure suits in the harsh environment of space, assessing their mobility and checking the motion of wrist, elbow and shoulder joints to help engineers design improved versions for future flights to the moon and, eventually, Mars.

Along with a full slate of biomedical research, the crew also tested laser communications technology linking the Crew Dragon to the Starlink constellation of commercial internet relay satellites.

“Early this morning via @Starlink space lasers, the Polaris Dawn crew chatted with SpaceX teams over coffee and donuts,” SpaceX posted on X Saturday. “During the 40+ minute uninterrupted video call, Dragon completed half an orbit over the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., cutting southeast over the Atlantic Ocean and rounding the Cape of Good Hope.”

Earlier in the mission, Gillis, an accomplished violist, participated in what amounted to an international concert from space, performing composer John Williams’ “Star Wars” song “Rey’s Theme,” accompanied by young musicians in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Sweden and Uganda.

https://x.com/PolarisProgram/status/1834557770374296010

The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned by Isaacman, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, in cooperation with Musk.

The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission while the third will be the first piloted flight of SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, now under development in Texas.
It’s not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX funded on its own.

Polaris Dawn is SpaceX’s fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and its 14th including NASA missions carrying crew members to the International Space Station. The California rocket builder has now launched 54 men and women to orbit since piloted flights began in May 2020.

SpaceX launched its latest batch of 21 Starlink satellites on a Thursday night Falcon 9 launch from California.

The Falcon 9 rocket launch set a new record for Vandenberg Space Force Base, marking the first time that 31 orbital missions have taken off in a calendar year. Thirty of those launches were from SpaceX and one was from Firefly Aerospace.

Liftoff of the Starlink 9-6 mission from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) happened at 6:45 p.m. PDT (9:45 p.m. EDT, 0145 UTC).

The Falcon 9 first stage booster supporting this mission, tail number B1071 in the SpaceX fleet, launched for an 18th time. It previously flew three missions for the National Reconnaissance Office (NROL-87, NROL-85 and NROL-146), two rideshare missions (Transporter-8 and Transporter-9) and ten Starlink missions.

A little more than eight minutes after liftoff, B1071 landed on the SpaceX droneship ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ This was the 101st landing on OCISLY and the 348th booster landing to date.

Among the 21 Starlink satellites are 13 that include Direct to Cell capabilities. With this launch, SpaceX will have a total of 207 of these satellites capable of providing signals to regular cellphones. According to expert orbital tracker and astronomer Jonathan McDowell, there are currently more than 6,400 Starlink satellites on orbit.

Dragon demo

Some hours after the launch from California, four astronauts orbiting in low Earth orbit will conduct a unique demonstration of the technology. The Starlink demonstration comes on flight day four for the Polaris Dawn mission.

A Starlink WiFi router is located within the Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft, which is connected to to a laser system embedded within the trunk of the Dragon called the “Plug and Plaser.”

“You might think getting internet might be as easy as flipping that switch and turning on your internet, but it’s not. We’re talking about a laser sending information to a Starlink satellite that is moving at orbital velocity, down to Earth and then back again,” said Sarah Gillis, a Polaris Dawn mission specialist and SpaceX engineer. “It’s been an incredible development effort by the SpaceX team and on a personal note, I’ve taken specific interest in this development effort and we have a special message that we will share with the world, using this technology.”

Hello Earth –

We are so grateful for all the support! Please enjoy two recent photos from our mission and stay tuned for our next message

Sent to you from space over a beam of Starlink laser light – Crew of Polaris Dawn pic.twitter.com/KkeZw1yAoT

— Polaris (@PolarisProgram) September 12, 2024

In a precursor to the formal demonstration, the Polaris Program shared a post on X, formerly Twitter, in which it said that the two embedded images of the crew and the Earth were sent via Starlink.

Part of the goal Polaris Program is supporting St. Jude Children Research Hospital and to do so, they are also bringing Starlink internet service to some of their locations around the world. They brought Starlink terminals to schools and hospitals in developing countries to bolster their connectivity.

In another SpaceX milestone, billionaire Jared Isaacman and company crew trainer Sarah Gillis took turns floating just outside their Crew Dragon capsule early Thursday in the first privately-financed spacewalk in the history of space exploration.

As he took in his first unobstructed look at the Earth 458 miles below, Isaacman marveled at the serene, boundary-free view, saying “back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world.”

With Polaris Dawn crewmates Anna Menon and Scott Poteet monitoring safety tethers and umbilicals inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon, airless with its hatch open, Isaacman floated out into open space around 6:51 a.m. EDT, using a scaffold-like “Skywalker” framework for stability.

While his feet were just outside the hatch, he did not “free float” away from the Crew Dragon. The Space-X designed pressure suits were not equipped with their own oxygen supply or other life support equipment and relied instead on the 12-foot-long umbilicals to deliver air, power and communications.

As Isaacman and then Gillis floated one at a time just outside the hatch, they tested the comfort and mobility of their pressurized extra-vehicular activity, or EVA, suits, moving their arms, hands and legs through a series of positions to find out how much effort is required to carry out basic tasks.

“We’re going to make use of various mobility aids the SpaceX team has engineered, and it’ll look like we’re doing a little bit of a dance,” Isaacman said before launch. “The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions.”

Cameras mounted inside and outside the Crew Dragon, along with others attached to the spacewalkers’ helmets, provided wide-angle views of space and the Earth below as the ship sailed through an elliptical orbit with a low point of 121 miles and a high point of 458 miles — 200 miles higher than the International Space Station.

“It’s gorgeous,” Isaacman said, taking a moment to take in the view after carrying out his portion of the mobility tests.

The goal of the one-hour 46-minute spacewalk was to help company engineers perfect low-cost, easy-to-manufacture spacesuits for use by future commercial astronauts flying to the moon or Mars aboard SpaceX Super Heavy-Starship rockets.

“Building a base on the moon and a city on Mars will require thousands of spacesuits,” SpaceX said on its website. “The development of this suit, and the EVA performed on this mission, will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions.”

Isaacman, Poteet, Menon and Gillis blasted off Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew accomplished the first major goal of the flight right off the bat, climbing to an altitude of 870 miles — higher than any piloted spacecraft since the Apollo moon program 60 years ago.

The high point, or apogee, of the orbit then was lowered to 458 miles for the spacewalk and the remainder of the five-day mission.

To prevent decompression sickness, or the bends, during the crew’s transition from sea-level pressure to the reduced 5 psi pressure in their spacesuits and back, flight controllers began a 45-hour process shortly after launch to boost oxygen levels in the cabin while slowly decreasing air pressure to help remove nitrogen from the crew’s bloodstreams.

“We don’t anticipate experiencing (the bends), because a ton of robust preparation has gone into developing this pre-breathe protocol, significantly reducing that risk,” said Menon, a former biomedical flight controller for NASA. “But we’re prepared if we need it.”

The Crew Dragon does not have an airlock and its life support system was not designed to support spacewalks. Required modifications included “adding a lot more oxygen to the spacecraft so that we can feed oxygen to four suits through umbilicals for the full duration of the spacewalk,” Gillis said.

“There have been upgrades and additions to the environmental sensing suite in the spacecraft to make sure we have really good insight, both before, during and after exposure to vacuum. And … an entirely new system, a nitrogen repress system” to boost the cabin back up to normal pressure after the spacewalk.

Along with the Skywalker scaffold, which extends just beyond the forward hatch, a motor drive system was added to assist with hatch opening and closing and upgraded seals were put in place to ensure an airtight fit.

Comonaut Alexei Leonov carried out the first spacewalk on March 18, 1965, followed three months later by NASA astronaut Ed White, the first U.S. spacewalker. Since then, NASA astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, Chinese taikonauts and astronauts from space station partner nations have carried out more than 470 government-sponsored spacewalks.

Isaacman said iconic photos of White floating outside his Gemini capsule against the backdrop of Earth and space were inspirational, but he and Gillis ruled out floating free of the Crew Dragon. And that was by design.
“We’re not going to be doing the Ed White float,” Isaacman told CBS News before launch. “That might look cool, but it doesn’t really help SpaceX learn a lot about the performance (of the spacesuit). It’s not very useful or helpful for figuring out how to be able to to work in a suit.”

To that end, he and Gillis worked through a “matrix” of choreographed motions to get a feel for how the suit’s multiple joints move while pressurized, to test the performance of an innovative heads-up display in the helmet, better understand how the air-cooled suits deal with the extreme temperatures of space and a variety of other factors.

The suit “includes all sorts of technology, including a heads-up display, a helmet camera, an entirely new architecture for joint mobility,” Gillis said. “There’s thermal insulation throughout the suit, including a copper and indium tin oxide visor that both provides thermal protection and solar protection.”

In addition, she said, “there’s all sorts of redundancy, both in the oxygen supply feed to the suit, as well as all of the valves, all of the seals across the suit. It’s an incredible suit.”

The heads-up display, which will project critical data on the lower left side of the helmet visor, is a feature NASA’s decades old space station suits do not have.

“During the EVA, we’ll have insight into our suit, pressure, temperature, relative humidity and then also an understanding of how much oxygen we’ve used throughout the EVA. So some key pieces of telemetry right there. And it’s it’s really cool (that) with any lighting you can still see it.”

The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned by Isaacman, an entrepreneur and philanthropist who owns and pilots his own MiG-29 fighter jet, in cooperation with Musk. The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission while the third will be the first piloted flight of SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, now under development in Texas.

It’s not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX funded on its own. Asked if he could share any details about the Polaris Dawn financing, Isaacman said “not a chance.”

The mission, SpaceX’s fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and its 14th including NASA flights, is expected to last five days, ending with splashdown off the coast of Florida.

Update: The Falcon 9 lifted off on time and successfully deployed the five BlueBird satellites.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is set to launch with the first five commercial satellites for AST SpaceMobile’s new cellular constellation. The satellites, called ‘BlueBird,’ are a precursor to the next generation of its satellites.

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is set for 4:52 a.m. EDT (0852 UTC), which is the opening of a four-hour window. However, weather may prove to be a spoiler for the launch opportunity.

Spaceflight Now will have live coverage beginning about one hour prior to liftoff.

Weather heading into the launch opportunity is far from ideal. The 45th Weather Squadron forecast just a 30 percent chance of favorable weather during the launch window.

“A stalled front stretching across the region and above normal atmospheric moisture will continue elevated chances of showers and thunderstorms across the Spaceport this week,” meteorologists wrote. “The front may be right overhead for the initial launch window early Thursday morning, and combined with a land breeze, the Probability of Violation will be on the higher end, with the Cumulus Clouds Rule, Thick Cloud Layers Rule and Surface Electric Fields Rule all possible.”

A 24-hour pivot would improve the weather up to a coin toss. One fortunate part of the mission for SpaceX is that the booster supporting the mission, tail number B1078, will be touching down at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) following stage separation. That means weather at a droneship site won’t be a potential roadblock to launch.

Prior to the BlueBird launch, B1078 flew 12 times, supporting a Crew Dragon mission to the International Space Station, the national security mission dubbed USSF-124, a pair of SES’ O3b mPOWER satellites and nine Starlink flights.

BlueBirds fly

The mission is the second launch for AST SpaceMobile, a company that describes itself as one which is “building the first and only global cellular broadband network in space to operate directly with standard, unmodified mobile devices based on our extensive IP and patent portfolio.” 

It’s also a publicly traded company company on the NASDAQ under “ASTS.” It first launched on another SpaceX mission, when it sent up its BlueWalker-3 satellite.

Each of the five BlueBird satellites will include a communications array that extends to 693-square-feet “to establish connectivity directly with cell phones via 3GPP-standard frequencies, and in partnership with leading cellular service providers around the world.” The forthcoming first generation of Block 2 satellites will be 2,400-square-feet.

In early August, the company announced the reception of an initial license for space-based operations from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC). This allows AST SpaceMobile to “to launch and operate V, S and UHF frequencies to support gateway, feeder link and telemetry, tracking, and control operations for the first five commercial BlueBird satellites,” according to AST SpaceMobile.

“This regulatory milestone is a significant step to targeting 100% nationwide coverage from space of the continental United States on premium cellular spectrum,” said Scott Wisniewski, President of AST SpaceMobile, in a statement. “Through our strategic partnerships with companies like AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone and our other key partners around the world, we aim to enhance cellular connectivity globally, essentially eliminating dead zones and empowering remote areas with space-based cellular broadband connectivity.”

These first five, Block 1 satellites will allow AST SpaceMobile to begin beta testing of nationwide, non-continuous service through AT&T and Verizon. The mission has been delayed for years, in part due to supply chain issues, according to quarterly earnings reports.

Back in 2022, Space News reported that the initial five satellites would need to be “of similar size and weight” of the BlueWalker 3 prototype. According to its second quarter earnings summary, its about 95 percent through manufacturing and producing 17 Block 2 satellites at its manufacturing facilities in Tessas.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX crew trainer Sarah Gillis prepared to open the forward hatch of their Polaris Dawn spacecraft early Thursday to take turns floating outside in the first non-government spacewalk in the history of space exploration.

With crewmates Anna Menon and Scott Poteet monitoring safety tethers and umbilicals inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, Isaacman and then Gillis plan to float out into open space after depressurizing the spacecraft around 2:23 a.m. EDT, using a scaffold-like “Skywalker” assembly extending just above the hatch for stability.

While their feet will be just outside the capsule, they will not “free float” away from the Crew Dragon. Their Space-X designed pressure suits are not equipped with their own oxygen supply or other life support equipment and rely on the 12-foot-long umbilicals to deliver air, power and communications.

As Isaacman and then Gillis float just outside the hatch, they will test the comfort and mobility of their pressurized extra-vehicular activity, or EVA, suits, moving their arms, hands and legs through a series of positions to find out how much effort is required to carry out basic tasks.

“We’re going to make use of various mobility aids the SpaceX team has engineered, and it’ll look like we’re doing a little bit of a dance,” Isaacman said before launch. “The idea is to learn as much as we possibly can about this suit and get it back to the engineers to inform future suit design evolutions.”

Cameras mounted inside and outside the Crew Dragon, along with others attached to the spacewalkers’ suits, are expected to provide spectacular views of space and the Earth below as the ship sails through an elliptical orbit with a low point of 121 miles and a high point of 458 miles — 200 miles higher than the International Space Station.

The goal of the exercise is to eventually perfect low-cost, easy-to-manufacture spacesuits for use by future civilian astronauts flying to the moon or Mars aboard SpaceX Super Heavy-Starship rockets.

“I think that this journey of creating affordable EVA suits that can be scaled up into mass production is a very worthwhile one,” Isaacman said. “There’s going to be an armada of Starships arriving on Mars at some point in the future, and those people are going to have to be able to get out of it and walk around and and do important things.”

Isaacman, Poteet, Menon and Gillis blasted off Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew accomplished the first major goal of the flight right off the bat, climbing to an altitude of 870 miles — higher than any piloted spacecraft since the Apollo moon program 60 years ago.

The high point, or apogee, of the orbit then was lowered to 458 miles for the spacewalk and the remainder of the five-day mission.

To prevent decompression sickness, or the bends, during the crew’s transition from sea-level pressure to the reduced 5 psi pressure in their spacesuits and back, flight controllers began a 45-hour process shortly after launch to boost oxygen levels in the cabin while slowly decreasing air pressure to help remove nitrogen from the crew’s bloodstreams.

“We don’t anticipate experiencing (the bends), because a ton of robust preparation has gone into developing this pre-breathe protocol, significantly reducing that risk,” said Menon, a former biomedical flight controller for NASA. “But we’re prepared if we need it.”

The Crew Dragon does not have an airlock and its life support system was not designed to support spacewalks. Required modifications included “adding a lot more oxygen to the spacecraft so that we can feed oxygen to four suits through umbilicals for the full duration of the spacewalk,” Gillis said.

“There have been upgrades and additions to the environmental sensing suite in the spacecraft to make sure we have really good insight, both before, during and after exposure to vacuum. And … an entirely new system, a nitrogen repress system” to boost the cabin back up to normal pressure after the spacewalk.

Along with the Skywalker scaffold, which extends just beyond the forward hatch, a motor drive system was added to assist with hatch opening and closing and upgraded seals were put in place to ensure an airtight fit.

NASA astronaut Ed White carried out the first U.S. spacewalk on June 3, 1965, floating free of his Gemini 4 capsule at the end of a long tether. Since then, NASA astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, Chinese taikonauts and astronauts from space station partner nations have carried out more than 470 government-sponsored spacewalks.

Isaacman said iconic photos of White floating outside his Gemini capsule against the backdrop of Earth and space were inspirational, but he and Gillis ruled out floating free of the Crew Dragon. And that’s by design.

“We’re not going to be doing the Ed White float,” Isaacman told CBS News before launch. “That might look cool, but it doesn’t really help SpaceX learn a lot about the performance (of the spacesuit). It’s not very useful or helpful for figuring out how to be able to to work in a suit.”

To that end, he and Gillis will work through a “matrix” of planned motions to get a feel for how the suit’s multiple joints move while pressurized, to test the performance of an innovative heads-up display in the helmet, better understand how the air-cooled suits deal with the extreme temperatures of space and a variety of other factors.

The suit “includes all sorts of technology, including a heads-up display, a helmet camera, an entirely new architecture for joint mobility,” Gillis said. “There’s thermal insulation throughout the suit, including a copper and indium tin oxide visor that both provides thermal protection and solar protection.”

In addition, she said, “there’s all sorts of redundancy, both in the oxygen supply feed to the suit, as well as all of the valves, all of the seals across the suit. It’s an incredible suit.”

The heads-up display, which will project critical data on the lower left side of the helmet visor, is a feature NASA’s decades old space station suits do not have.

“During the EVA, we’ll have insight into our suit, pressure, temperature, relative humidity and then also an understanding of how much oxygen we’ve used throughout the EVA. So some key pieces of telemetry right there. And it’s it’s really cool (that) with any lighting you can still see it.”

The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned by Isaacman, who owns and pilots his own MiG-29 fighter jet, in cooperation with Musk. The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission while the third will be the first piloted flight of SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, now under development in Texas.

It’s not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX funded on its own. Asked if he could share any details, Isaacman said “not a chance.”

The mission, SpaceX’s fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and its 14th including NASA flights, is expected to last five days, ending with splashdown off the coast of Florida.

An astronaut and avid photographer journeyed back to space for a fourth time on Wednesday. NASA astronaut Don Pettit, first ventured to the International Space Station as a member of Expedition 6 in November 2003 and last returned from a trip to the orbiting outpost on July 1, 2012.

Pettit departed for the ISS on the Soyuz MS-26 mission on Wednesday, Sept. 11, alongside Soyuz commander Alexey Ovchinin and fellow cosmonaut Ivan Vagner. This began the fourth flight for Ovchinin and the second for Vagner.

Liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome happened at 9:23 p.m. MSK (12:23 p.m. EDT, 1623 UTC).

During prelaunch interviews on Aug. 16, Pettit described being in space as his “home away from home.”

“Each time you go into space, it’s a little different. Things have changed since your last visit,” Pettit said. “Like a cowboy that wants to be on a horse out in the range, I’m an astronaut that needs to be sitting on a rocket and flying in space.”

Now that they’re on orbit, the space station will soon transition from Expedition 71 to Expedition 72. That will be made official with the departure of Soyuz MS-25 and its crew: Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub and Tracy Dyson.

Pettit takes credit for driving the design of the mission patch that will represent Expedition 72. He said he was inspired by the simplicity of the Expedition 1 patch, which led to the forthcoming design.

“I told the NASA graphic designer to make an Expedition 1-type patch, make it round instead of rectangular, but bring the configuration of the space station up to date,” Pettit said. “And he did that, Sean Collins did. And he even put the iROSA solar panel upgrades on the profile of station in their proper location. So, I like the simplicity of this patch.”

Expedition 72 starts in September about a week after I dock at @Space_Station with my Soyuz crew.

When designing this mission patch, I wanted something simple and patterned after Expedition 1, which had a front profile view of space station’s configuration at that time.

This… pic.twitter.com/Cu7QWT2Pgt

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) June 5, 2024

Among Pettit’s contributions to the astronaut office since his selection in 1996, he is known for his striking photography captured while on orbit. One of his objectives will be working with the camera used in the videos displayed within the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas.

He said he’s also looking forward to advancing the ability to take more dynamic nighttime images while on orbit.

“I’ve actually talked NASA into flying a number of new lenses, highly optimized for nighttime imagery and they just arrived on station with NG-21,” Pettit said, referring to the recently launched Northrop Grumman Cygnus spacecraft. “I’m looking forward to putting these nighttime optimized lenses to use.”

Pettit also has the distinction of taking the one millionth photo on the ISS in 2012. He said his focus when he returns is not on hitting a number, but on capturing “interesting phenomenon.”

“One phenomenon that has recently come about that I really want to see if I can capture is this atmospheric phenomenon, typically associated with the aurora, called STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement ),” Pettit explained. “I’ve looked back at my Expedition 30/31 images to see if I inadvertently captured STEVE. So far, I have not seen any imagery with STEVE both from my mission and from missions since then, so I’m hoping to really see if I can capture a large scale view of the STEVE phenomenon.”

One of my star trails from @Space_Station, blurring golden city lights with the arcing stars of deep space.

Composites like this are made from many images, creating a time history of earthly and cosmic phenomena that maps our universe as a function of time. The blue marks of… pic.twitter.com/w1lK39HFuP

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) June 1, 2024

Pettit will be returning to an ISS advanced by more than a decade of development. He said turned to NASA astronauts Mike Barratt and Tracy Dyson to get their insight as fellow travelers who have also been away from the ISS for more than 10 years.

“I was surprised at their answer. They said station is cleaner, more organized and the software tools we have for stowage and for doing inventory management and even our operating days through the scheduled timeline, these tools, these software tools are so much more efficient than what we had in the past,” Pettit said.

“They were impressed with the efficiencies of operation on space station compared to how it was 10, 12 and in some cases, 14 years ago.”

During his time in between missions, Pettit has been busy with duties within the astronaut office, including serving as a technical astronaut working on NASA’s Gateway program and the Human Landing System version of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.

But he said there’s nothing that can supplant the sensation of actually traveling back to space himself.

“There’s just a certain facet of when I go into space that just fundamentally is just fundamentally on resonance with my soul,” Pettit said. “I feel extremely fortunate and am please and excited that I have another opportunity to fly into space.”

When asked if this will be his last spaceflight, Pettit simply replied, “No, I like to say, this is my next spaceflight.”

History made

With the launch of the Soyuz MS-26 mission and its arrival on orbit, a new world record was broken. For the first time, 19 people were simultaneously orbiting the Earth, breaking the previous record of 17 people set in May 2023.

In addition to Pettit and his two cosmonaut crew mates, there are nine people onboard the space station, four astronauts inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience for the Polaris Dawn mission and three Chinese taikonauts onboard the Tiangong space station.

The record comes as the Polaris Dawn quartet are preparing to perform the first spacewalk that doesn’t feature a national governmental body, like NASA or Roscosmos.

The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft hatch was officially opened at 5:58pm ET where @NASA_Astronauts Don Pettit and cosmonauts Alexey Ovichinin and Ivan Vagner were welcomed by the current crew on the International @Space_Station. pic.twitter.com/U51jcVMhdB

— NASA’s Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) September 11, 2024

Update 6:06 a.m. EDT: Crew Dragon Resilience separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage.

Despite some challenging weather at the opening of the launch window, SpaceX managed to send the Polaris Dawn commercial astronaut mission up to low Earth orbit on the second of three available liftoff opportunities.

The predawn launch began the journey for four astronauts aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, named ‘Resilience.’ The Falcon 9 rocket supporting the flight lifted off Tuesday at 5:23 a.m. EDT (0923 UTC).

“You embark on a journey, not just for yourselves, but for all of humanity. Each of you has trained tirelessly and prepared rigorously for this moment, the moment where we reach higher in space than ever before,” said Frank Messina, the Polaris Dawn launch director. “As you gaze towards the North Star, remember that your courage lights the path for future explorers.

“We trust your skills, your bravery and your teamwork to carry out the mission that lies ahead. Know that the team back here is with you every step, watching, supporting and cheering you on as you walk into space. We’re sending you hugs from the ground. God speed, Polaris Dawn crew. May you make history and come home safely.”

“Dragon, C.E. (chief engineer), welcome to orbit. The Dragon team is honored to help you start your incredible journey,” added Jared Metter, the chief engineer for the Polaris Dawn mission. “We hope you enjoyed the ride. The whole SpaceX family is looking up to you. Godspeed and good luck.”

“We appreciate the kind words. We wouldn’t be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back at SpaceX and everyone else cheering us on,” said Mission Commander Jared Isaacman. “We appreciate it and we’re going to get to work now.”

Polaris Dawn, the first of three planned missions for the Polaris Program, will feature the first commercial spacewalk, an on-orbit demonstration of Starlink and sending its crew further from Earth than humans have gone since the end of the Apollo era.

Its crew consists of Isaacman, the CEO of Shift4 Payments and commander of the Inspiration4 mission; former U.S. Air Force pilot Scott ‘Kidd’ Poteet; and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. Gillis and Menon became the first current SpaceX employees to travel to space.

The mission is a free-flying flight of Resilience, which will last a little more than five days in total. Because of that, SpaceX also needed to have good recovery weather for splashdown off the coast of Florida.

Following an initial ground systems issue during the first launch attempt, splashdown weather has been the sticking point that kept this mission on the ground until now. In its post announcing the new target launch date on X, formerly Twitter, SpaceX said that “conditions at the possible splashdown sites for Dragon’s return to Earth remain a watch item.”

“This is a big improvement over the last two weeks,” Isaacman said in a post on X prior to launch. “We are getting closer to getting this mission to orbit.”

Coming into the launch, the National Hurricane Center was tracking Tropical Storm Francine in the Gulf of Mexico along with two other storm systems making their way over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

“An elongated area of low pressure over the central tropical Atlantic  is producing some disorganized shower and thunderstorm activity,” the NHC wrote. “Environmental conditions appear only marginally conducive for some  slight development during the next couple of days, but a tropical  depression could still form during that time while the system moves  westward at 5 to 10 mph over the central tropical Atlantic.”

The Falcon 9 rocket supporting the mission, tail number B1083 in the SpaceX fleet, launched for a fourth time on this flight. It previously supported the Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station as well as sending two batches of SpaceX Starlink internet satellites into low Earth orbit.

With the Crew Dragon spacecraft stacked on top, the launch vehicle stands at 65 m (213.3 feet) tall. Named ‘Resilience,’ the Dragon made its third trip to space after launching both the Crew-1 mission and Inspiration4, Isaacman’s first voyage beyond Earth.

Because Resilience will be launched into a 190 x 1,200 km (118 x 746 mi.) orbit at a 51.6 degree inclination, B1083 will land on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ about 9.5 minutes after liftoff.

Time was running short to get this mission off the ground. NASA needs SpaceX to start readying the pad at Launch Complex 39A for a Falcon Heavy launch. That rocket is needed to launch NASA’s Europa Clipper mission on its way to the Galilean moon of Europa.

The planetary launch window opens up on Oct. 10 and it will take weeks for the conversion of the pad from a Falcon 9 to a Falcon Heavy configuration.

“SpaceX continues to improve and reduce the LC-39A pad conversion processing timelines when changing configuration between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy,” said Tim Dunn, the senior launch director for NASA’s Launch Services Program. “LSP will utilize these improvements for the Europa Clipper mission. The exact number of days required for the configuration change has not been finalized but it will be less than 25 days.”

Leaving its crew behind in orbit, Boeing’s troubled Starliner spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station Friday and chalked up a successful unpiloted return to Earth, closing out a disappointing test flight with an on-target and apparently problem-free New Mexico touchdown.

Despite NASA’s concerns about earlier thruster problems and multiple helium leaks in the ship’s propulsion pressurization system, the Starliner had no trouble undocking and moving away from the station at 6:04 p.m. EDT and executing a critical 59-second deorbit braking maneuver at 11:17 p.m. to drop out of orbit.

Slamming into the discernible atmosphere 400,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, the Starliner streaked across the Baja Peninsula and northern Mexico before descending to a parachute-and-airbag assisted touchdown at White Sands Space Harbor in the New Mexico desert at 12:01 a.m. EDT Saturday.

NASA and Boeing recovery teams stationed nearby quickly reached the spacecraft to begin “safing” operations and to carry out post-landing inspections.

Left behind in orbit were Starliner commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and pilot Sunita Williams, who were ordered to remain aboard the space station after NASA managers decided their spacecraft could not be trusted to bring them safely back to Earth.

As it turned out, the Starliner appeared to perform well. The known helium leaks did not get worse and the reaction control system thrusters in the ship’s service module, the ones that had problems early in the mission, worked as required to safely move the spacecraft away from the station and to keep it stable during the de-orbit burn.

But the road ahead is far from clear for the Boeing ferry ship. The service module was jettisoned as planned before re-entry, burning up in the atmosphere, and engineers will not be able to examine the hardware to pin down exactly what caused the helium leaks and degraded thruster performance during the ship’s rendezvous with the station.

Instead, they will face more data analysis, tests and potential redesigns expected to delay the next flight, with or without astronauts aboard, to late next year at the earliest.

“Even though it was necessary to return the spacecraft uncrewed, NASA and Boeing learned an incredible amount about Starliner in the most extreme environment possible,” Ken Bowersox, space operations director at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement.

“NASA looks forward to our continued work with the Boeing team to proceed toward certification of Starliner for crew rotation missions to the space station.”

In any case, the successful landing was a shot in the arm for Boeing engineers and managers, who insisted the Starliner could have safely brought Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.

But NASA managers concluded there was too much uncertainty to risk the astronauts. And so, Wilmore and Williams will remain aboard the space station until late February, hitching a ride home aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft being readied for launch Sept. 24 to ferry the next long-duration crew to the lab.

The Crew Dragon normally launches with four crew members, but two NASA astronauts were bumped from the upcoming Crew 9 flight to free up seats for Wilmore and Williams. They’ll join Crew 9 commander Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov for a normal six-month tour of duty.

By the time they return to Earth around Feb. 22, Wilmore and Williams, who originally expected to spend about eight days in orbit, will have logged more than eight-and-a-half months in space.

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio faced a similar dilemma in 2022 when his six-month stay aboard the station was extended to more than a full year because of problems with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that carried him to orbit.

“I think going from six months to 12 months is tough, but it’s not as tough as going from eight days to eight months,” Rubio said in an interview with CBS News. Asked how Wilmore and Williams took the news of their extension, he said “they’re doing great.”

“Certainly, there’s a little part of you that’s disappointed,” he added. “It’s okay to acknowledge that. But you also can’t mope around for the entire time, right? … You just have to kind of dedicate and rededicate yourself to the mission.”

Series of setbacks for Boeing

The decision to bring the Starliner down without its crew was a morale-sapping blow to Boeing in the wake of earlier problems that delayed the Starliner’s first piloted flight by nearly four years, required a second unpiloted test flight and cost the company more than $1.5 billion above and beyond its NASA fixed-price contract.

The Starliner woes come on top of Boeing’s ongoing struggle to restore public confidence in the wake of two 737 Max 8 airliner crashes, a close call with an Alaska Airlines 737 flight that suffered a door plug blowout earlier this year and more recent problems with an upgraded version of the company’s long-haul 777 aircraft.

It’s not yet known what will be needed to correct the problems encountered on the latest Starliner flight, whether another costly test flight will be required or when the ship might be ready for active service ferrying astronauts to and from the station.

“I want to recognize the work the Starliner teams did to ensure a successful and safe undocking, deorbit, re-entry and landing,” Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager said in a statement. “We will review the data and determine the next steps for the program.”

The space station crew closed the Starliner’s hatch at 1:29 p.m. Thursday. The day before, as Williams worked inside the Starliner helping arrange return items to ensure the right balance and center of gravity, she described the moment as “bittersweet.”

“Thanks for backing us up, thanks for looking over our shoulder and making sure we’ve got everything in the right place,” she told flight controllers. “We want her to have a nice, soft landing in the desert.”

After a final check of the weather at the New Mexico landing site, hooks in the Starliner’s docking mechanism disengaged, allowing springs on the station side to push the uncrewed ferry ship away.

A series of thruster firings then were executed to slowly push the spacecraft out in front of the lab complex before looping up and over the top and departing to the rear. Seven minutes after undocking, the Starliner exited a 1,300-foot-wide safety zone known as the “keep out sphere.”

Given the earlier thruster problems, NASA shortened the departure timeline to get the Starliner well away from the station as quickly as possible. Sixteen minutes after leaving the keep-out sphere, the spacecraft exited the larger “approach ellipsoid,” another safety zone around the ISS that measures 2.5 miles long and 1.2 miles wide. The thrusters worked flawlessly throughout the early stages of the departure.

The ship’s flight computers were programmed to guide the spacecraft toward a precise point in space for the critical de-orbit braking burn needed to drop the ship out of orbit.

Right on cue, four large orbital maneuvering and attitude control rockets — OMACs — fired for 59 seconds, slowing the ship’s 17,100-mph velocity by nearly 300 mph. That was just enough to drop the far side of the orbit into the atmosphere for re-entry and descent to the New Mexico landing site.

While the powerful OMAC braking rockets were firing, smaller reaction control system, or RCS, jets fired on computer command to keep the Starliner stable and pointed in the right direction.

Once the de-orbit burn was complete, the Starliner’s service module, housing the OMACs, 28 RCS jets, the helium tanks and other critical but no-longer-needed systems, was jettisoned to burn up on the atmosphere.

The crew module, protected by a heat shield and equipped with 12 RCS jets of its own, then began its re-entry at an altitude of about 400,000 feet, enduring temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it plunged back into the lower atmosphere at nearly five miles per second.

About 10 minutes later, at an altitude of about 24,500 feet, two small drogue parachutes unfurled, slowing and stabilizing the Starliner. About one minute after that, at an altitude of 8,000 feet, three pilot parachutes pulled out the ship’s three 104-foot-wide main parachutes, slowing the decent to about 18 mph.

At an altitude of 2,500 feet, airbags inflated to reduce landing impact forces to the equivalent of walking speed. Touchdown came at 12:01 a.m. EDT (10:01 p.m. Friday local time).

The de-orbit burn and computer-orchestrated attitude control system firings were crucial to getting out of orbit on the precise trajectory needed for a pinpoint landing. And all of those firings required pressurized helium to push propellants to healthy thrusters.

During the Starliner’s rendezvous with the space station on June 6, the day after launch, five RCS jets were “deselected” by the flight computer because of degraded thrust. In addition, four helium leaks in the propulsion pressurization system were detected, adding to a small leak that was detected before launch.

After extensive tests and analyses, Boeing engineers concluded the helium leaks were the result of slightly degraded seals exposed to toxic propellants over an extended period. But even with the leaks, they said the Starliner had 10 times more helium on board than needed to get out of orbit.

The thruster problem, testing indicated, was caused by high temperatures that, in turn, caused internal Teflon seals to deform in poppet valves, restricting the flow of fuel.

The high temperatures, the engineers concluded, were largely the result of manual flight control tests that caused the jets to fire hundreds of times in rapid-fire fashion while the craft was oriented so those same jets were in direct sunlight for an extended period.

In test firings later in the mission the jets appeared to be working normally, indicating the seals had contracted back to, or near, their original shape.

Boeing argued manual flight tests would be ruled out for a piloted return to Earth, the craft would be oriented to minimize solar heating on the suspect jets and fewer firings would be needed in the absence of a rendezvous.

Boeing tried to convince their counterparts at NASA that the Starliner had plenty of margin and could bring Wilmore and Williams safely back to Earth.

But NASA managers did not accept Boeing’s “flight rationale” and opted to bring the Starliner down without its crew.

“Spaceflight is hard. The margins are thin. The space environment is not forgiving,” said Norm Knight, director of flight operations at the Johnson Space Center. “And we have to be right.”

The summer-long saga of the Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test is set to come to an end on Friday. Landing at the White Sands Space Harbor shortly after midnight on Saturday. Starliner will make its final journey without crew onboard. NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will remain onboard the International Space Station as members of Expedition 71/72 before their return onboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft no earlier than February 2025.

Follow our live blog for updates throughout the evening from undocking to landing and the post-landing briefing.

SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket with an undisclosed number of satellites on behalf of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). The spacecraft, which are believed to be Starshield satellites, make up the third batch of what the NRO calls its “proliferated architecture.”

Liftoff of the NROL-113 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base happened at 8:20 p.m. PDT (11:20 p.m. EDT, 0320 UTC).

The Falcon 9 booster supporting this mission, tail number B1063, will be launching for a 20th time. It previously supported the launches of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the Transporter-7 rideshare mission and 14 Starlink satellite missions.

The mission marks the most seasoned booster to launch a national security mission on behalf of the NRO. The previous record was the NROL-146 mission, another Starshield launch, which liftoff off on B1071’s 16th flight.

About 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1063 is set to land on the SpaceX droneship, ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ If successful, this will be the 100th landing on this droneship and the 345th booster landing to date.

“This is NRO’s third proliferated architecture launch within four months, demonstrating the rapid pace of delivery for these systems,” the NRO wrote in a Sept. 4 social media post.

The NRO plans to launch about six missions for this proliferated constellation in 2024. Its most recent launch came on June 29, 2024.