¶Polaris Dawn. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon ‘Polaris Dawn’ mission launched in the early morning yesterday. The privately-funded mission was initially scheduled to take off a few weeks back but was delayed by splash-down zone weather, ground systems, and the loss of the venerable fleet-leading Falcon 9 booster B1062 with a brief subsequent FAA grounding. The ambitious five-day mission will orbit as high as 1,400 km, the farthest humans have ventured from Earth since Apollo 17 in 1972. Onboard are billionaire funder Jared Isaacman (commanding the mission), retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel Scott "Kidd" Poteet (pilot), and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon (both mission specialists). The two SpaceX engineers will be the first SpaceX employees to make it to space—a fitting milestone for the company that has launched the majority of astronauts and payload over the past decade. This mission is scheduled to include the first-ever private spacewalk (at 700 km) in which the cabin will be depressurized, with the whole crew having donned new SpaceX EVA suits. Then, two crew will leave the vehicle for short 15-20 stints outside. The mission’s EVA suits, based on SpaceX’s existing IVA suits, will be used during both launch and landing, as well as during the EVA itself. The suits have new thermal management systems and heads-up displays. The astronauts will also perform experiments, and the vehicle will test a laser communication link with Starlink. Due to the O2 requirements of evacuating and repressurizing the Dragon capsule during EVA, splashdown can’t be delayed as much as it can in other Dragon missions, making consumables the primary limit on the mission’s length. We wish them a fun and safe trip! |
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¶New Glenn inches closer, but not quickly enough for EscaPADE. NASA announced that it would not be fueling the Mars-bound EscaPADE duo due to the likelihood of their missing the Mars launch window, which would then force the removal of hypergolic fuel (which is super not fun/might kill you). This means that EscaPADE will not launch on New Glenn’s first flight, previously scheduled for next month, but now targeting November. This launch will carry a Blue Ring test mission in place of the two Marscraft. Pieces are quickly falling into place for New Glenn, with its landing platform drone ship arriving at the Cape (a soft landing is a secondary objective for the first flight), final first stage mating, and lots of tests. Tim Dodd recently toured Blue’s impressive facilities with Bezos and released his second video last week showing New Glenn’s launch pad (first part, focused on the production facilities, here). EscaPADE will presumably still launch on New Glenn—NASA shared dates as soon as spring of 2025, suggesting a less energetically favorable (read slower) Mars transfer trajectory. |
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 | New Glenn’s first stage final mating operation in progress. Credit: Blue Origin |
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| ¶News in brief. Starliner successfully departed the ISS autonomously (video) and landed safely at night (video), giving some credence to Boeing’s suggestion that it was safe for astronaut return all along ● After presumably resolving the lost fuel tank debacle from December, Europe’s Vega rocket lifted off for the 20th and final time with the original vehicle configuration (before Vega-C takes over), carrying Sentinel-2C for the Copernicus EO program ● Colorado startup Mesa Quantum announced $3.75M in seed funding to develop chip-scale quantum sensors for alternative Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) ● Evolution Space launched a sub-scale test rocket to 16.8 km from Spaceport Company’s sea-based platform ● ATLAS Space Operations raised $15M to grow their ground station network ● Senegal became the third African nation to join the China-led International Lunar Research Station program ● Starlink now has >7,000 active satellites in orbit ● The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency launched a $700M program to use AI to analyze satellite imagery and geospatial data ● According to a new thread from Elon, the first uncrewed Starships to Mars could launch in 2 years (the Elon time calculator estimates 6 years), with crew in four years and a full Martian city in 20 years ● Chinese startup iSpace raised a $99M Series C to accelerate the development of its first-stage reusable launch vehicle, Hyperbola-3 ● Singapore-based startup Eartheye Space raised $1.5M in pre-seed funding to expand their online platform for EO satellite-tasking ● NASA is providing $476M to eight commercial EO providers as part of their Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition Program ● After deploying its sail last week, NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System spacecraft is beaming down images and data while tumbling through space (attitude control is temporarily disabled while the mission teams characterizes the booms and sail). |
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 | The view from one of four black-and-white wide-angle cameras aboard NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System, showcasing the reflective sail quadrants supported by composite booms. Because of its large size and reflectivity, the sail can be seen from the ground and tracked via NASA’s mobile app #SpotTheSail. |
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¶Etc.- Going to be in NYC for Climate Week toward the end of the month? Ben is helping to organize a Climate × AI hackathon on Saturday, September 21st. Register and send us a note if you’d like to participate! (Feel free to shoot Ben a message as well if you’d just like to meet up later in the week.)
- SpaceX penned a public complaint on its website after the FAA pushed back its timeline for licensing Starship Flight 5 from mid-September to late-November. Delays by the FAA are due to the hot stage marine splashdown location changing and the sonic boom from Super Heavy as it returns for a catch attempt.
- Five papers based on imagery from DART and LICIACube during DART’s collision with Dimorphos were recently released. They look at the geology and surface composition of both Dimorphos and its larger companion Didymos, finding low surface strength and evidence that Dimorphos is composed of material flung off when Didymos spun up over time. They also find that Didymos’s surface, at about 12.5 million years old, is about 40-130x older than Dimorphos’s aggregated surface (300,000 years old). There’s a cool video of a Didymos-like object spinning up and forming Dimorphos at some point in the past. (Some particles from the impact may even reach Earth in a decade or so. Although harmless, if they reach us they will represent humanity’s first artificial meteor shower—the “Dimorphids”.)
- Even as NASA and ESA are rethinking their Mars sample return efforts due to ever-growing timelines and costs (c.f. Issue 266), China is forging ahead with plans for a 2028 sample return mission. Building on the success of the country’s Tianwen-1 Mars lander and two ambitious and successful lunar sample return missions, Tianwen-3 will use two launches of the heavy lift Long March 5 to loft both a lander with an ascent vehicle and an orbiter with a return module to Mars. The lander may carry a helicopter or a six-legged crawling robot for sample collection, with the goal of looking for samples that could show signs of ancient life. The mission will invite international collaboration, and China stresses that it will abide by bi-directional planetary protection protocols. (Ed., We wonder if SpaceX will also abide by them if a Starship heads toward the red planet as Musk predicts.)
- BurstCube (c.f. Issue 282) detected its first gamma-ray burst.
- NASA’s PREFIRE mission released its first science data, revealing the amount of heat the Arctic and Antarctic regions emit into space. “With the addition of the far-infrared measurements from PREFIRE, we’re seeing for the first time the full energy spectrum that Earth radiates into space, which is critical to understanding climate change.”
- The Higgs particle could have ended the universe by now—here’s why we’re still here: if they existed, primordial black holes should have caused Higgs field nucleation and vacuum collapse, but since we’re still here, that fact kind of disproves them.
- A NASA video of flying through the Pillars of Creation in 3D.
- Steve Jurvetson’s personal collection of space hardware and memorabilia is impressive.
- A real-time map of lightning strikes around the world. Here’s another site run by an informal group of hobbyist lightning detectors. ⚡
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The ESA/JAXA BepiColombo mission flew by Mercury last week, with this image taken 3,459 km away on the fourth of the craft’s six gravity assist maneuvers before starting science operations in early 2027. Due to ongoing electric thruster issues, the spacecraft flew an altered trajectory that took it 35 km closer to Mercury. |  |
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