September 10, 2024 at 9:19 a.m. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Billionaire Jared Isaacman is back in space, but this time he’s planning on taking a historic walk outside the spacecraft as SpaceX found a hole in the weather to get the Polaris Dawn mission off the ground early Tuesday. A Falcon 9 topped with the Crew Dragon Resilience skipped over the initial 3:38 a.m. target for liftoff at KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A because of lingering rain cells. But weather cleared enough for a misty predawn launch at 5:23 a.m. taking Isaacman and three crewmates on a five-day trip to space that seeks to feature the first-ever commercial spacewalk. “Today you embark on a journey not just for yourselves, but for all humanity. Each of you has trained tirelessly and prepared rigorously for this moment,” SpaceX Launch Director Frank Messina after the crew made it safely into space. “Godspeed Polaris Dawn crew, may you make history and come home safely.” “We appreciate the kind words,” replied Isaacman. “We wouldn’t be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back in SpaceX and everyone else cheering us on. We appreciate it. We’re going to get to work.” The Falcon 9 lit up the skies casting an amber glow over low-lying cloud cover that moved ghostlike over the space center as the rocket climbed higher. For a time, the bright-burning engines created a small halo rainbow around the trailing flame like an iris of an eye piercing through the darkness. Polaris Dawn launches aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. .Mission Commander Jared Isaacman; Mission Pilot Scott Poteet; Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis; and Mission Specialist & Medical Officer Anna Menon are aboard the private spaceflight who will attempt the first commercial spacewalk…(Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel) Isaacman, who made his fortune from credit-card processing company Shift4 Payments, made his first trip to space in 2021 on the Inspiration4 mission, which was the first all-civilian mission to space. For Polaris Dawn, he’s flying with three new crewmates, former Air Force pilot Scott Poteet and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. After midnight, the four crew had walked out from SpaceX’s crew building at Launch Complex 39-A and ventured into a pair of Teslas for a very short ride up the hill to the launch tower. They had all climbed aboard the capsule by 1 a.m. and performed com checks and suit leak checks before 1:30 a.m. “The crew has taken their last breath of fresh air, until they splash down in five days,” said SpaceX commentator Jessie Anderson. “The side hatch is now closed. One of the last major milestones for the crew before liftoff.” They had to bide their time for an extra two hours, though, after the first liftoff opportunity was called off. In the end, the quartet mad it off the pad on the first of up to three missions under Isaacman’s Polaris Program, a partnership with SpaceX that looks to push commercial spaceflight boundaries. Its final mission will be the first crewed mission of SpaceX’s in-development Starship and Super Heavy. The efforts of each mission look to pave the way for SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s dreams of building a colony on Mars. To that end, Isaacman and Gillis will tackle the biggest of the mission’s goals on day three when they both venture outside the Dragon on 12-foot-long tethers performing a series of maneuvers off what SpaceX calls the “Skywalker,” a mobility aid with hand and footholds that will allow the duo to never lose contact with the Dragon. Each will be outside the spacecraft for 15-20 minutes during the event that SpaceX plans to live stream Thursday. “The idea is to develop, test new technology and operations in furtherance of SpaceX’s bold vision to enable humankind to journey among the stars,” Isaacman said last month when he arrived to KSC. The path to space has been a long one. When originally announced in 2022, Isaacman thought he’d be flying by the end of the year. That schedule kept getting pushed as SpaceX figured out how it planned to safely perform the spacewalk.