Polaris Dawn – private initiative in space trip

The Polaris Dawn mission of Elon Musk’s SpaceX which tested the newly-prepared spacesuits by getting civilians to do a spacewalk at the farthest point from the earth, 877 km away, has ended well.

Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman financed the first of the three-stage project, and he became the first civilian to try out the spacesuit and test it during the spacewalk outside the Resilience spacecraft.

Sara Gillis, a SpaceX engineer, followed Isaacman, in stepping out of the craft, stretching her arms, although with certain caution. She also carried a violin and played the film ‘Star Wars’ theme song, which was relayed through Starlink, Musk’s satellite system.

The mission was manned by retired US Air Force Thunderbird pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, who stayed strapped in the craft while Isaacman and Gillis ventured out of the vehicle.

For many observers of space missions, Polaris Dawn opens a new chapter, adventurous and exciting, because it gets civilians into the act of becoming space travellers. This is part of Musk’s daring plan for the future of setting up a colony of human beings on Mars. Whether the Mars goal is reached or not, what is becoming the norm is that private operators of space missions like Musk are creating an alternative to the militarily trained astronauts of America, cosmonauts of Russia and taikonauts of China, who have been members of space missions, carrying out different tasks.

Musk wants to re-enact the European pioneers who explored the different continents of the world, including the North and the South Pole in space, in interplanetary travel and colonisation of other planets. This is but a small and tentative beginning. There would be many hazards on the way, many failures and many successes. All that can be said is that there is a long trek ahead of human beings. Musk is sure to occupy the place of a buccaneer looking out for the El Dorado in the large stretches of space that span distances between earth and other planets.

Even as the governments and their space agencies, especially the government of the United States and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), do not want to bear the sole responsibility of conducting space travel in the future, and they are only too happy to shift the burden to private players, it has to be seen as how many Musks would step forward to become the brave spacefarers. This requires huge amounts of money and it also means a large technical workforce. Musk would not only have to organise the space missions, find ways to finance them, but also find the people who would get on to the missions.

Going by the experience of how British colonies were set up on the eastern seaboard right from the 17th century, the space missions for future colonisation of Mars and other planets will have to be free enterprise ventures. It would seem Musk seems to know the way into the future, though he may find it difficult to let go of the controls as he had to do in Tesla, while he clings to the controls in X, formerly Twitter, and SpaceX.

It would appear that episodes like Polaris Dawn are like the infolding of science fiction, where human imagination and daring fashion technology combine to forge into the unknown. This is going to be a bumpy ride and there is need for all tech billionaires to join hands. There do not seem to be too many Musks around to push the migration of humans from earth. It may take a while to gain the critical mass of support from brave individuals with money and imagination to take on the task.