SpaceX’s historic Polaris Dawn astronaut mission remains on schedule and is scheduled to launch early Tuesday morning (August 27).
Over the weekend, SpaceX briefly ignited the engines of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that will launch Polaris Dawn in a standard pre-flight test, the so-called “static fire.”
“Falcon 9 static fire test is complete – scheduled for launch on @PolarisProgram’s Polaris Dawn mission on Tuesday, August 27 at 3:38 a.m. ET,” the company announced on X on Sunday morning (August 25). Later that day, SpaceX released two photos of the test in another X post.
Polaris Dawn will launch from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and carry four people into orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. The company will broadcast the launch live.
If all goes according to plan, the Polaris Dawn crew — Commander Jared Isaacman, Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and Mission Specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon — will travel farther from Earth than any human has since the Apollo era. Isaacman and Gillis will also conduct a spacewalk, the first ever performed on a private spaceflight.
Related: SpaceX launches private spacewalk mission Polaris Dawn for the furthest manned space flight since Apollo
Isaacman has been in orbit before. He also led and funded the groundbreaking Inspiration4 mission, a three-day trip that SpaceX conducted in September 2021.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned missions in the Polaris program, a human spaceflight project organized and funded by Isaacman. The third mission in the series, if all goes according to plan, will be the first manned flight of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket.
