SpaceX Launches Spacewalk Mission, Anna Menon On Board
India-West News Desk
WASHINGTON, DC – Four private astronauts blasted into space early on September 10 in a modified SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, kicking off the company’s five-day Polaris Dawn mission, which aims to test new spacesuit designs and conduct the first private spacewalk.
Among the crew is engineer Anna Menon, 38. Menon is the wife of Malayali medical expert Dr Anil Menon who is based in Minnesota and involved in future NASA projects. Anna Menon serves in mission control as a mission director and crew communicator. Prior to SpaceX, she worked for seven years at. With husband Anil she has a son James, and daughter Grace.
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payment company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. He has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Others in the crew are mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel; and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30.
It is Crew Dragon’s fifth – and riskiest – private mission so far. The spacecraft will eventually settle into an oval-shaped orbit.
Only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have done spacewalks in the past. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk is planned for the mission’s third day at 700 km in altitude and will last about 20 minutes. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft will slowly depressurize its entire cabin – it has no airlock like the ISS – and all four astronauts will rely on their slimmed-down, SpaceX-built spacesuits for oxygen.
For the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft tethered by an oxygen line while Poteet and Menon stay in the cabin.
The four-person crew are effectively test subjects for an array of scientific experiments that will aim to shed light on how cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space affect the human body, adding to decades of studies on astronauts living aboard the ISS. (with input from Reuters)
