SpaceX is all set and ready for the historic Polaris Dawn mission to launch tomorrow, in which four private astronauts will travel into orbit and perform the first commercial spacewalk. Scheduled for launch early on Tuesday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the crew will travel in a Crew Dragon spacecraft on a five-day mission.
Part of the selling point of the mission is that it is not just space tourism but a chance to perform useful scientific research. Several institutions are sending experiments into orbit as part of the mission, including a groups of experiments into human health run by Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at Baylor College of Medicine.
The experiments from TRISH going on the Polaris Dawn mission including testing out a miniaturized, intelligent ultrasound — seen above — on which the astronauts have been trained. The idea is that astronauts can scan themselves with the tool to get quick, medical-quality images that could be important for future space health strategies.
Other experiments include looking into how and why time spent in space affects the eye, as it is known to cause vision problems that are one of the biggest issues for astronauts in longer-term space missions. Similarly, the astronauts will be measured to see to what degree the fluids in their bodies pool in the upper half during their time in space, another known spaceflight issue.
There will also be research into methods for counteracting motion sickness, which affects some crew members, and collecting data on space radiation to understand how astronauts are exposed.
“The Institute’s mission is to help humans thrive in deep space,” said Dorit Donoviel, TRISH executive director and associate professor for the Center for Space Medicine at Baylor. “We are grateful to our commercial space exploration partners, and in particular, the Polaris Program, who recognize how important it is to carry out and support health research in their missions, as a route to improving health for all humans in space and on Earth.”
With the readiness review for Polaris Dawn completed, everything is set for the launch to go ahead Tuesday morning, and we’ll keep you updated with all the latest news on the launch.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.