Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Meet the Polaris Dawn Crew with Commander Jared Isaacman, Mission Pilot Scott Kidd Poteet, and Mission Specialists Sarah Gillis & Ana Menon 8/16/24

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

Only a few years after Jared Isaacman made history with the first all-private human spaceflight, he announced a new series of missions in partnership with SpaceX. He unveiled the Polaris program: a series of tech demonstration missions to culminate in the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship. After thousands of hours of training, the first of the missions – Polaris Dawn—is scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center as early as this month. The crew, including Mission Commander Jared Isaacman, Mission Pilot Scott Kidd Poteet, and Mission Specialists Sarah Gillis & Ana Menon, join Morgan Brennan from their training center at SpaceX HQ to discuss their training, expectations for their mission, attempting the first commercial spacewalk.

Mere months after Jared Isaacman made history commanding the first all-private spaceflight, Inspiration4, the Shift4 founder and CEO announced a new, even more ambitious plan, a partnership with SpaceX called the Polaris Program. In February of 2022, on the debut episode of Manifest Space, he unveiled it. What the Polaris Program is, is a series of tech demonstration missions, building blocks, if you will, that will culminate in the first flight, or first crewed flight of Starship. Now, our first mission is called Polaris Dawn,

and that will launch later this year. And it has a number of really ambitious objectives. So we're going to go farther into space than any human being has gone since we last walked on the moon. We're going to do an EVA or a spacewalk, testing a new generation spacesuit. And we're going to communicate over lasers using the Starlink satellite constellation. And then we have a bunch of research and science that's stacked in between the five-day duration of our mission. Two and a half years later, after thousands of hours of training, including flying fighter jets and working through Dragon capsule simulations,

Polaris Dawn is finally a go, scheduled to lift off from Kennedy Space Center as soon as August 26th. The crew? Isaac Min is the commander, Scott Kidpotit is mission pilot, and Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both SpaceX engineers, are mission specialists. Polaris Dawn will fly farther into space than any human since the Apollo era, orbiting Earth three times higher than the International Space Station. They will make history in brand new spacesuits, conducting the first ever private spacewalk, and all of it with an earthly mission of raising money for St. Jude Children's Hospital. Welcome to our simulator. We have spent, I don't know, probably hundreds of hours in here over the last two and a half years. This is where we do everything from science and research experiments to running through simulations of launch and reentry and then all of the, you know, Apollo 13-like emergencies they can throw at us. So this has become like a home away from home for us. I think it's especially significant because just a couple days ago, we put our mission patch sticker

on the outside of the simulator and signed it, which is what you get to do when you're certified for flight. So from here, we're heading to Kennedy Space Center in just a couple of days and getting ready for launch. On this episode, the Polaris Dawn crew joins me exclusively from their training capsule inside SpaceX HQ, detailing their plans and preparations. As training ends, quarantine begins, and the countdown to liftoff commences. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, the crew of the historic upcoming mission Polaris Dawn. Jared Isaacman, Commander, Scott Kidd-Poteet, Mission Pilot Sarah Gillis, Mission Specialist, and Anna Menon, Mission Specialist. It's so great to speak with you today.

As you do countdown, you're finishing up training, you're beginning the quarantine process, you're getting ready to fly to Kennedy Space Center. You have a liftoff scheduled for later this month. Jared, I'll start with you here. Tell us about where you're sitting and what it signifies with this mission that's been two and a half years in the making. Yeah. Hey, Morgan, thanks for having us on on this. Yeah, so welcome to our simulator. We have spent, I don't know, probably hundreds of hours in here over the last two and a half years.

This is where we do everything from science and research experiments to running through simulations of launch and reentry and then all of the Apollo 13-like emergencies they can throw at us. So this has become like a home away from home for us. I think it's especially significant because just a couple of days ago, we put our mission patch sticker

on the outside of the simulator and signed it, which is what you get to do when you're certified for flight. So from here, we're heading to Kennedy Space Center in just a couple days and getting ready for launch. So, Jared, does that mean that you now have two signatures on the side of that piece of hardware? I actually do. So I remember sitting down with you back in early 2022 when you were unveiling. You joined me from Starbase.

You were unveiling the Polaris program, of which Polaristan is the first of three scheduled missions here over the coming years. As we just mentioned, you've been to space before as well. Why is it so critical to be doing these missions, which have some very ambitious components to them to continue to open up and enable the space economy? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, this is all part of SpaceX's grander vision, which is, you know, to make life multi-planetary and just make the world a more exciting and interesting place when you can journey among the stars. And they have big plans on how to achieve it. It's with a brand new spaceship called Starship. It's going to be fully reusable. There's going to be hundreds and thousands of them out there,

and they're going to take us back to the moon. NASA's contracted, you know, to use a derivative of Starship to land on the moon, and then it's going to Mars and beyond. But there's an awful lot that you need to accomplish from, you know, where we are today and getting to that point in time in the future. So, you know, leaving kind of the comfort of going to and from the space station, which is incredible, but if we're going back to the Moon and Mars, we're going to have to get out there farther into space where you've got, you know, more micrometeorites, you've got higher

radiation environments, and there's a lot to learn about that. You'll probably need some new space suits. You're going to want to get outside the comfort of your vehicle and explore the Moon and Mars. You're going to need new forms of communication when you've got, you know, tens of thousands of people in space. There's a lot of real development to do. And that's what Polaris program is about. It's a joint partnership with SpaceX where we're testing all these things out. And pretty much everything I covered are the primary objectives for the first mission that we're flying on in just a couple of weeks. And speaking of flying further out into space, Scott, the fact that on this mission, part of the objective is to be flying three times further out into Earth orbit than the International Space Station currently is right now. What has gone into the training to be able to do that?

What do you expect in terms of some of the experiments and some of the testing and some of the health outcomes? Yeah, great question. So the training program, we've been at it, this journey is about two and a half years long. You know, we spent a lot of time in this capsule going through the procedural training, the checklist procedures, working together as a team, crew resource management, handling the contingencies,

just working together in order to have a successful mission. Along with that, we've done a lot of practical training to get ready for the EVA. So we've dedicated a lot of time, a lot of resources. The team here at SpaceX has done an awesome job to prepare us for this mission. And as you mentioned, we're going to continue to push the envelope and setting that higher altitude as an objective is critical to a successful mission. So we're all looking forward to it and excited for what the journey has. And speaking of EVA, we're talking about Spacewalk. This will be the first time we've ever seen a fully private spacewalk. Jared, you'll be doing

that. Sarah, you will be as well. I realize the spacecraft is going to be vented, so everybody's going to be having that exposure to space. But Sarah, what's gone into this? What are you expecting to get from being in space for several hours? Yeah, thanks, Morgan. You know, this entire objective, this spacewalk that we're hoping to accomplish has been such a tremendous team endeavor over the last two and a half years. You know, SpaceX didn't even have an EVA suit when we started. And over the last development, we have slowly been iterating on the suit design. And it has been this back and forth between coming in and testing brand new joints, brand new features every week. And so at this point,

we've spent probably well over 100 hours in the suits. And I can tell you they're incredible. But a lot of that training has happened right here. All four of us are going to get suited up, pressurized, and that's what the simulator does. It allows us to train end-to-end the response, how the suits pressurize, the full sequence of software that we'll go through. And I don't really think there's any rock that the SpaceX team hasn't looked under at this point. So much testing and so much critical attention has gone into every aspect of it. I know we're all really excited. I think, as you mentioned, we're all going to be going to the vacuum of space and we're all going to be critical to this operation. So now that you're seeing the capsule during the spacewalk, this is up above us is where we'll actually go

out into the vacuum of space. So we'll all be in this volume and then depressurize our atmosphere and climb up through that forward hatch. So I think it will be incredible and I think we're ready. Anna, you work with crews on behalf of SpaceX, as does Sarah. So now to be going to space yourself, what does this mean for you? And perhaps just as interestingly, the fact that this is the first time ever we're seeing employees of SpaceX go to space, what does that signify? You know, I think this is incredibly meaningful. I think that, you know, this is a mission that's demonstrating that you can continue to open up access to space in all sorts of ways.

You know, I think that this is the first time that SpaceX is flying its engineers to space, its people to space. But I hope that this is just the first of many. I think there's a really exciting future ahead for all of us where hundreds, thousands of people are turning amongst the stars. Scott, SpaceX had issues with a second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket earlier this summer. It grounded launches for a couple of weeks, clearly since Ben cleared. But did it give you any pause? Absolutely not. You know, two and a half years of preparation. And the SpaceX team is not going to launch this until we're 100% ready. And we, you know, proved that with our training, with graduation yesterday. So we're prepared. The team is prepared. We've had a very

open dialogue with the entire SpaceX organization and leadership, and it's a daily check-in. We've participated in a lot of the readiness reviews, and the whole purpose of that is just to ensure that all the hardware, software, and the crew are ready for this mission. And I have no hesitation whatsoever. Sarah, I mean, space is not without risks. The Boeing Starliner situation sort of sheds a light on the risks of testing new technology, for example. Has that situation changed how you think about spaceflight and your own mission? You know, I think we are certainly needing to continue to explore. We can't stop making progress and continuing to push technology. You know, there's so many critical objectives on this mission, and I know we're really excited to get to them.

I also know how much work the entire SpaceX team has put into ensuring there's absolutely nothing we haven't assessed and looked at. So I think we're all ready. The SpaceX team, our mission control team is ready. And so we're ready to launch at this point. Yeah, and Morgan, I just say, I mean, sometimes we just actually crave a normal simulation where nothing goes wrong. In fact, like when you think about the last two and a half years of development and training for this, almost every scenario that we're approached has multiple things that are going wrong to kind of stress the situation and make sure we're prepared. Even

yesterday, which was a final confidence test of the EVA operation, two different things went wrong. So, I mean, the reality is, is that when the actual mission comes time to fly, most of these things, if not all of them, are going to go exactly as planned. But if not, I mean, we spent the last two and a half years preparing for, you know, unexpected developments. And Jared, with the last mission, we actually saw the milestones of that mission play out in the stock of the company that you founded and that you run, Shift4. And you've told me in the past that inspiration for that first mission did raise awareness, perhaps continue to fuel the momentum that we've seen in Shift4's growth as well. Does that flywheel continue here? Yeah, I mean, I certainly, you know, take my responsibilities to my day job very, very seriously. The better we do as an organization, the more we spread out around the world and kind of

conquer in the verticals that we're aiming on, the more resources can be achieved to apply to things that are very important to me, one of which is St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. That's a mission and vision I'm very, very passionate about, as is what we're doing here at SpaceX. But I'd say all of these relationships have certainly come back to help at Shift4. For example, a lot of our international expansion right now, I think, is where we're following a really important customer. And in fact, the capabilities we brought to the nonprofit vertical and learning how many problems

there are in payments and, you know, facilitating donations in all these various countries, we've learned based on challenges that St. Jude's had and tried to help solve. So, you know, I think there's just a lot of carryover benefit from one to the other. But at least for the next week, we're going to be pretty focused on one in particular. And that's a good mission for Blairstone. I mean, we were just talking about risk management, all the preparation that's gone into this from the actual spaceflight side and the SpaceX side. But I do wonder what that means from the Shift4 side, Jared, whether it's conversations with the board, whether it's contingency plans, succession plans, et cetera. Yeah, I mean, you know, we have an independent

board. We have an incredible management team. They're all doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, you know, thinking through, you know, succession planning and whatnot. And this isn't obviously a new development. You know, we had a very successful mission to space almost three years ago. So I'd say since then, I would think only the public markets, our board and investors have grown even more confident with the rest of the management team. So I fully expect to come back after my five day, you know, short vacation,

but I'd say the organization is in like incredible hands. And Anna, I mean, we were just talking about conversations with the board, but conversations with family and loved ones, how are they preparing for your mission? We are all really lucky to have incredibly supportive families, and they are just as much a part of this journey as we are. In fact, I think sometimes that they're doing the hardest job.

We approach this conversation in a really open dialogue. We continue to talk about it. For our family, we continue to bring our kids along on the journey. My husband and I speak really openly with them and try to engage them in every step from two and a half years ago when this journey started and through the next few weeks too, so that they can really understand what's happening here and learn from it, be inspired by it, hopefully. One way that I have sought to connect with my kids through this journey is I authored a children's book named Kisses from Space with

Kerry Vasek, illustrated by Andy Harkness. And the story is the story of the power of love to overcome any distance. And it's the story I wrote for my kids on this journey as a way to connect. So that's just one example. I'll be reading that book to my kids, as well as some of the brave patients of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Live From Space. So really looking forward to all of these moments of connection with our families. I can't wait to listen into that.

So I'll just go down the line here. The thing you're most excited about with this mission, the thing that maybe you're the most nervous about. Want to start down there? You know, it's really hard to pick just one moment. I think that, you know, a lot of incredible planning and preparation by the entire team has gone into making this mission possible. And so I think the thing I am truly most excited about is going up and executing on this timeline and executing all of these objectives. I think, you know, it's really, as a SpaceX engineer,

it's really important to me to learn a lot while we are up there, bring back as much learning as possible for the SpaceX team, for the future of human spaceflight. And so I'm looking forward to really capturing as much as possible for everybody. I'd say the most, you know being a fighter pilot i'm really looking uh looking forward to the launch you know you go from

1g at zero miles an hour and within a few minutes you're going 17 500 miles an hour pulling four or five g's on the way up uh riding a rocket so um that's something I'm definitely looking forward to. Once we're on orbit, we're going to take the opportunity to share this experience with the world through the ways of communication. So that's something I'm looking forward to. And lastly, the reuniting on Splashdown with the family, because they've been there tried and true throughout this entire experience. And we want to share that and looking forward to that. Yeah. Hey, Morgan. I mean, we've packed these five days with a lot of objectives,

a lot of science and research. I think what I'd be most nervous about, and I know really speak for the entire crew, would be coming up short on anything. Like we, to us, we want to get everything accomplished. That's how you define like mission success. So, you know, making sure we get to get everything accomplished that's that's how you define like mission success so um you know making sure we get to get through all that and and what i'm most excited about is

really um just seeing the reaction uh on all my crew faces when we arrive in space you know we've become like a family the last two and a half years spending a lot of time and and what you can say is not a you know it's not the roomiest um you know compartment but by spaceship say it's not the roomiest compartment, but by spaceship standards, it's actually pretty generous. And having been there before, when that second engine cuts off and you are now in orbit, it's like a really special moment. I know what it felt like for me. And this time I'm going to be looking at the people to my left and right? Gosh, for me, I think I am most excited to kind of share what we're doing on this mission with the world. We have some really big objectives.

We're gonna be testing out a whole new communication system, but I think we have some really good surprises in store to share with the world. And I really hope we can communicate just how incredible our Earth is and what we can do when we work together to make progress for space and progress on Earth as well. So stay tuned during the mission because there's going to be some fun stuff. I think we're really looking forward to it. It's going to be another history-making mission. Before I let you go, quickly, I mean, the capsule you're sitting in. A little bit of a tour.

A little bit of a tour. What are things going to be? How is this going to look for five days? Yeah, sure. So, well, like, this is our, this is like the cockpit of the spaceship. And in good SpaceX form, you're not seeing hundreds of buttons and joysticks. It's all touchscreen driven. So it can do a lot of things for you. It has like an incredible autopilot, but it also has all the backup manual systems you would need in any contingency to kind of come home or to troubleshoot the problem. And then every bit of space here, there is a compartment.

I mean, you know, they don't waste any of the volume if possible. So like literally underneath where this laptop is sitting right now is our, you know, fire suppression systems, you know, underneath, you know, the seats on the outside is where all of our water is. Underneath where I'm sitting is where all our food is. So, you know, we absolutely make the very most of it. And then as Sarah pointed out before, directly above us right here, you know, this is the forward hatch. This is where when Dragon would normally go to the space station, the astronauts would make their way through into the space station. This is what we'll be using to go outside

and conduct our spacewalk. And a lot of cameras, so we can show you guys in live streams during the launch, the EVA, the splashdown, so you can experience as much as we do. Well, we look forward to this. The crew of Polaris Dawn, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space.

Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.