The Polaris program is a private spaceflight program organized by entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. Building on his experience as commander of the Inspiration4 mission—the first all-civilian spaceflight—Isaacman contracted with SpaceX to create Polaris. The program involves two missions using SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft and will culminate in a planned crewed flight on Starship.
The Polaris Dawn mission propelled Isaacman and his crew of three—Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon—to an elliptic orbit on 10 September 2024 that took them up to 1,400 kilometres (870 mi) away from Earth, the farthest anyone has been from the planet since NASA's Apollo program, so that they pass through parts of the Van Allen radiation belt to study the health effects of space radiation and spaceflight on the human body. Later in the mission, with a lower apogee, Isaacman and Gillis successfully completed the first commercial spacewalk.[2]
Launching at a date and with a crew yet to be announced, the second mission in the Polaris Program will launch via a Falcon 9 Block 5 vehicle with a Crew Dragon capsule. The mission could potentially lift the Hubble Space Telescope into a higher orbit to prevent it from burning up in the atmosphere.[3][4]
The third Polaris mission is set to be launched on Starship, SpaceX's next-generation launch system, "very far off in SpaceX’s future". Starship is in early flight testing as of September 2024 and is planned to carry crew only after Starship has made approximately 100 successful cargo flights.[5] This is to be the final flight of the Polaris Program.[6][7]
