“Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned Polaris missions funded and led by Isaacman, the chief executive of payment-processing firm Shift4, based in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. One of the goals of the Polaris programme is to help advance the human-spaceflight ambitions of Hawthorne, California-based firm SpaceX. The third Polaris mission will be the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship, a fully reusable mega-rocket that NASA has enlisted to transport astronauts in several years to the Moon’s surface, as part of its ambitious Artemis programme.

Before any of that, Polaris Dawn is testing some basics. For one, it debuted SpaceX’s EVA suit, the company’s first suit designed to protect humans from the vacuum of space. Gillis and Isaacman wore the suits during their spacewalk. ‘It’s not lost on us,’ said Isaacman at the 19 August press conference, that ‘someday someone could be wearing a version’ of the suit while walking on Mars.

For another, the mission is studying the health of the crew members on board. ‘Spaceflight is just a huge stressor,’ says Jimmy Wu, the deputy director of the Baylor College of Medicine’s Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) in Houston, Texas, which collects medical data on commercial space travellers, including the Polaris Dawn crew.

Researchers think that private crewed spaceflights will help to get answers faster about how spaceflight affects health than government-led missions with trained astronauts, because they are lifting off more often. ‘It is really hard to study astronauts because it takes so long to get even 10 or 12 of them through six-month missions,’ says Leigh Gabel, a kinesiologist at the University of Calgary in Canada, who studies the effects of microgravity on bone health. ‘Private space travel could give us a real leg up.'”

From Nature.