Aug. 28, 2024 6:25 AM PT Share via Who are the other crew members on the mission? The pilot is Scott “Kidd” Poteet, 50, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has logged 400 hours of combat flight time and has served as an executive at Shift4. The medical officer is Anna Menon, an operations engineer at SpaceX who has worked on the Dragon program. Mission specialist Sarah Gillis also is an operations specialist at SpaceX who oversees the company’s astronaut training program. This is the first spaceflight for all three. The crew has been training for two years, including skydiving at the U.S. Air Force Academy and experiencing zero-gravity flight, similar to what NASA astronauts go through. They even hiked to the summit of Cotopaxi, a nearly 20,000-foot peak in Ecuador. How will the space walk be carried out? The crew will attempt the space walk while the Crew Dragon is roughly 430 miles above Earth, putting it nearly 200 miles higher than the International Space Station. SpaceX says that colonizing the moon and Mars will require the production of thousands, if not millions, of space suits, and that this is the first iteration of one that can do the job. The form-fitting suits looks little like the bulky suits NASA astronauts have long used to weather the harsh space environment. Those suits include packs that allow astronauts to survive in space without support from a spacecraft. The Polaris Dawn astronauts will receive their life support from long hoses. Due to the lack of an airlock on the Crew Dragon, the 13-foot-wide capsule will be depressurized and exposed to space during the walk. However, only Isaacman and Gillis will “walk” outside the craft. Are there other scientific goals for the mission? The Crew Dragon capsule will be launched into a highly elliptical, or oval-shaped, orbit that at 870 miles above Earth will take it through portions of the Van Allen radiation belts, zones of highly charged solar particles with varying radiation levels. Scientific research will be conducted throughout the mission to better understand human health during long-duration spaceflights, such as a flight to Mars. Multiple universities are collaborating on the research, including USC, Johns Hopkins and Cornell. Will there be any other benefits to the mission? The crew will test SpaceX’s Starlink communications system — which provides satellite-based high-speed internet to residential customers — for space communications. There also is a philanthropic component. The three-day Inspiration4 mission raised more than $250 million for cancer research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. This flight is also raising money for the same cause. Advertisement