SpaceX Polaris Major New Update Revealed!

You got a telescope that'll deviate from orbit? Who you gonna call? The United States Space Force? Nope. NASA? Nah. Billionaires? Apparently that is indeed a possibility. The billionaires in question are Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive of SpaceX, and Jared Isaacman, a technology entrepreneur who led an all-civilian trip to orbit in a SpaceX spacecraft last year. NASA announced on the 22nd of September that it and SpaceX had signed an agreement to conduct a six-month study to see if one of SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsules could be used to raise the altitude of the Hubble Space Telescope, potentially further extending the lifetime of the 32-year-old instrument. After the Hubble reached orbit in 1990, it suffered blurry vision because its mirror had been ground to a slightly odd shape. Astronauts fixed that problem during a space shuttle mission in 1993. After the fifth and last repair trip by NASA astronauts in 2009, the space shuttle Atlantis dropped Hubble off at an altitude of about 570 kilometers. What we want to do is expand the boundaries of current technology. We want to show how we use commercial partnerships as well as the public-private partnerships to creatively solve challenging and complex problem missions such as surfacing Hubble, Jessica Jensen, vice president of customer operations and integration at SpaceX said. After the success of the Inspiration4 mission to orbit last year, Mr. Isaacman announced Polaris, a follow-up collaboration with SpaceX that would make a series of flights to orbit to perform various technology demonstrations. Expanding the scope of their joint ambitions, the Polaris program intends to debut the world's first privately developed EVA spacesuit, test spacecraft to spacecraft communications using Starlink's network of space lasers, and culminate in the first crewed launch of SpaceX's next generation Starship rocket. On its own, the decision to privately fund and develop an EVA suit and pursue the ability to conduct EVAs out of Crew Dragon represents a major leap forward for SpaceX and private spaceflight if realized. But crucially, when asked about the synergies between the Polaris program, SpaceX, NASA, and Isaacman, a future Polaris mission could rendezvous with the Hubble, nudge it higher up, and perhaps perform other repairs and upgrades to the space telescope, which has experienced periodic outages because of technical glitches. According to Isaacman, he and SpaceX are willing to undertake a sixth Hubble servicing mission, more or less pro bono, with little or no potential cost to the government. It's possible that the study could result in a Hubble servicing mission becoming the second Polaris program mission. The cargo bay of the space shuttle was large enough to hold Hubble, which at 13 point meters long and 4.2 meters wide, is roughly the size of a school bus. The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, including the trunk portion that is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns to Earth, is smaller than Hubble, at about 8.1 meters tall and 4 meters in diameter. During the shuttle mission to Hubble, astronauts installed a docking ring that was to help NASA take Hubble out of orbit when it needed to. The Crew Dragon might be able to link to the ring in order to raise the observatory's orbit. The next steps depend on what comes out of the feasibility study. Over the past months, SpaceX and Polaris teams have been hard at work in preparation for Polaris Dawn's targeted launch. Development is underway on multiple fronts as teams continue to identify scientific research and experiments, design, build, and test the spacesuit required for the first commercial spacewalk, develop technological firsts for Starlink, fundraise with Polaris program partners to raise awareness of the mission's purpose with St. Jude, and more. The Polaris Dawn crew began training in May in California, kicking off the start of their mission with two days of basic medical and scuba training to learn skills that will help the crew communicate during the first commercial spacewalk. Nonverbal communication and buddy support skills used in scuba are comparable to communication skills used during extravehicular activities. The crew spent the first day in a pool refreshing themselves on basic diving skills before completing offshore dives at Catalina, where they started to get comfortable with uncomfortable situations, while also adapting to physiological responses due to changes in pressure. Scuba is only one element of the SpaceX training program planned for the Polaris Dawn crew. To continue to build team dynamics and trust, the crew completed multiple high-altitude climbs in Ecuador, including Cotopaxi, an active volcano in the Andes Mountains. At 5,897 meters, Cotopaxi is the second highest peak in Ecuador. This expedition required the crew to not only acclimate to different altitudes throughout the climbs, but rely upon basic technical mountaineering and glacier crossing skills. Stay tuned to this site for more details to come on the team's trip to Ecuador. Meanwhile, in mid-June, Polaris Dawn's medical officer Anna Menon and mission specialist Sarah Gillis completed a week of emergency medical skills training at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. The week of on-site training was designed to provide real-world exposure to the range of medical issues the crew may encounter on orbit, and provide Anna and Sarah with an opportunity to learn how to manage those issues in real-time under supervision from experienced medical professionals. Their training focused on initial and focused assessments, collection of vital signs, triage, physical exam skills, basic life support, and airway management, and other procedural medical skills encompassing a wide array of potential concerns they may need to attend to in space. In early August, the Polaris Dawn crew completed training to familiarize themselves with the symptoms they may experience while at higher altitudes where there's a lack of oxygen as well as the g-forces experienced during launch and re-entry. In mid-September, the crew completed their first week of EVA training, practicing maneuvers necessary to move in and out of Dragon during a spacewalk. They also reviewed development of EVA technology and lessons learned from the last 50 years. Then, fighter jet training weekend began for the Polaris Dawn crew, familiarizing the team with high g-forces and crew resource management in a high-consequence environment. And most recently, the crew trained for space on a zero-gravity parabolic flight. They familiarized themselves with weightlessness and practiced conducting science experiments that will fly on Dragon during their five-day mission to space. The training will continue until everything is ready, and we can't wait to watch SpaceX's first spacewalk. Godspeed, Polaris! And with that, today's episode has come to its conclusion. Thank you so much for watching, and if you enjoy what my team and I are doing, you can become a patron through our Patreon link in the description below. Otherwise, as always, this is Kevin with Great SpaceX, and my team and I will see you next time.