Main Engine Cut Off - T+208: The Polaris Program

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Jared Isaacman, commander of Inspiration4, announced the Polaris Program—a privately-funded development program to “rapidly advance human spaceflight capabilities” via flights on SpaceX’s Dragon and Starship vehicles. It begins with a mission to the highest Earth orbit ever flown by humans, featuring the first commercial spacewalk, and culminates with the first crewed Starship flight.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 40 executive producers—Simon, Lauren, Kris, Pat, Matt, Jorge, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Joonas, Robb, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SEE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Hemant, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, and seven anonymous—and 738 other supporters.TopicsPolaris ProgramInspiration4 - HomeJared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) / TwitterStarship Update - YouTubeThe ShowLike the show? Support the show!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOListen to MECO HeadlinesJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterBuy shirts and Rocket Socks from the Main Engine Cut Off ShopMusic by Max JustusArtwork photo by ULA

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I am Anthony Colangelo, and I want to talk about the brand new announcement from Jared Isaacman and SpaceX this morning of the Polaris program. Jared Isaacman, you will know from the Inspiration4 mission, the private mission that went to orbit last year, featured in a Netflix documentary of, you know, everyone was talking about it for several months there. So I won't rehash that entirely, but essentially the Polaris program is a follow-on to that, but it is a full-on program. The way it was announced is that it is up to three missions, two on Dragon, one on Starship, that would be the first crewed flight of Starship in the future. So obviously that it is up to three missions, two on Dragon, one on Starship. That would be the first

crewed flight of Starship in the future. So obviously that one is very dependent on all the other schedules going on across this whole thing. But really what this is, is that Jared Isaacman is somebody who really wants to help the development of space and he's using his resources to do so. Inspiration4's origin story was that he was trying to invest in SpaceX, but that opportunity wasn't there. But what was there was the opportunity to fly on a private mission. And clearly, that is a path that seems viable for him to contribute to the future development. Now, this one is much less, you know, a customer buying a flight on Dragon. This seems much more like a partnership between SpaceX and Jared Isaacman and his team, the Polaris program overall. And that's headlined by the fact that the first flight, Polaris Dawn,

which is slated for the end of 2022, is made up of Jared Isaacman, the commander of both Inspiration 4 and this mission, and Scott Poteet, who was the mission director of Inspiration 4, a very close friend of Jared's, somebody that you saw a lot on that Netflix documentary if you did watch it. But the other two flying on this flight are Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon from SpaceX. They are lead space operations engineers at SpaceX. They both worked on Inspiration4, I believe. I know Sarah did. I'm pretty sure Anna did. Her husband, Anna's husband, Anil, just got selected as a NASA astronaut candidate. He was a medical officer, not on the flight, but on the ground for Inspiration4, also featured in the Netflix documentary. So half of this crew is coming from SpaceX directly. And it really shows, I think, the shift from Inspiration4 being, you know,

a kind of one-off tourism flight with a nice messaging around it. But Polaris program is a very serious business effort to develop new capabilities on Dragon and eventually on Starship. And that's kind of the way that I think Jared Isaacman sees his opportunity to contribute to the development of space through going in on partnerships like this with SpaceX to push the capabilities. Certainly, SpaceX could go off and develop any number of capabilities for Dragon, but they're not going to do that unless there's a customer there or the potential to actually use that capability in either the near future or the current time. So Jared is providing that kind of platform for them, right?

That there's somebody there that's going to make use of the brand new fancy window that they put on Dragon for Inspiration 4. And what Jared gets out of it is an epic view of Earth. And what SpaceX gets out of it is a window that they can put on any Dragon capsule and sell those flights in the future. the future. On this first mission, Polaris Dawn, they're going to be pushing in a couple of different directions. So they're first going to go to a higher altitude than they flew on Inspiration 4. They peaked out at around 580 something kilometers, if my memory's correct, which was extremely high, but they're going to try to go to the highest Earth orbit that's ever been flown, which would beat out some Gemini records at around 1400 kilometers, if they're capable of doing that. They also want to do the first commercial spacewalk at around 1400 kilometers, if they're capable of doing that. They also want to do the first commercial spacewalk at around 500 kilometers orbit. They would want to go outside the spacecraft out the top hatch of Dragon and use a new EVA suit derived from the spacesuit

that they wear while on launch and reentry. On the renderings, it looks like there's a tether running to the spacesuit that's going to provide you know the environmental and life support systems uh and obviously a tether to the spacecraft so they don't go floating away on their own so it is a very closely derived eva suit from that iva suit that they've been flying they're going to depressurize the whole cabin much in the way of gemini that means the special hardware here is going to be that front hatch that will handle all the depressurization, repressurization, obviously some handrails and things like that for the spacewalk as well. And this is one that, you know, is this useful for SpaceX to have for the future of what they want to do, which is make life multi-planetary? Certainly. This is a very useful thing to develop for them.

Is it useful to Jared to go outside of a spacecraft at 500 kilometers? Hell yeah, it is. Who wouldn't want to do that, right? This is, again, that same kind of partnership mentality of, is this something that Jared wants to experience or Jared and his team want to experience? Is this something that's useful for SpaceX in the future? And they're finding that sweet spot there. The other one, you know, in addition to the health research they're going to be doing on this high altitude orbit, the other one they're going to be developing is the capability for the Dragon spacecraft to communicate via the Starlink constellation. And they say this will be the first crew to test that in space, which would provide better data connectivity in the future for missions like this. And missions, you know, not like this that also derive from the same laser-based hardware.

So while they wouldn't get into the actual details, there was a media call just before this as I record, they wouldn't get into the details of funding or partnership or really any numbers like that. But I think it's clear from not only the crew that's going on board this flight, half Jared's team and half SpaceX's, but also the capabilities that they're developing. These are all things that are very useful to SpaceX that are also very interesting to Jared. And I think that makes it pretty plain what the partnership is here, whether it's 50-50 or if Jared's, you know, defraying the cost of flight while SpaceX is taking on the cost of development.

You know, however that works out, we'll never know. We don't know what's going on behind the scenes. Is Jared getting ownership shares by way of developing these things? We really don't know. We never will know. They're not going to give us that information. So instead, I'd like to focus on what this kind of means in this, both this model, though I think that's kind of a straightforward reasoning, but also what this means in terms of watching the things that SpaceX thinks it's worth developing. but also what this means in terms of watching the things that SpaceX thinks it's worth developing. One other stray thought that I had about this program overall, when I heard the name, it made me think of a polar orbit. And as someone who seems to like doing the firsts, like Jared Isaacman likes to do, flying the first crew to polar orbit would be a really big achievement. But there's major limits right now especially in dragon for that because you know this flight i asked this on the media call is also flying to the same inclination as iss and

inspiration for 51.6 degrees inclination and that sets them up for you know using the same abort zones and recovery zones that those flights to the iss do and that's why they made use of that for inspiration for they didn't have to change their abort or recovery program. They could use the same abort zones. They could make sure that they're safe all the way up to orbit and on the way back down. But as I've watched these launches to polar orbit from Cape Canaveral, I kept thinking this would be the route that you would want to fly humans on to polar orbit because of that same thinking. You know, I got to see one of these things with my own eyes from Southwest Florida a couple weeks back, and you can tell just from that that they launch from Cape Canaveral, they skim the Florida coast, they fly through the Caribbean, certain trajectories

even take you down the west coast of South America. So if you're considering the kinds of close-to-shore abort and recovery zones that you need for a human spaceflight mission, that certainly seems like the route that you would want to do that. Now, is Falcon capable enough to get Dragon to a low orbit there? You know, they probably wouldn't have enough capability to go. They certainly wouldn't be able to go to the orbit that Polaris Dawn is trying to go to up to 14, 1500 kilometers. But could they get to a low orbit with Falcon 9? Maybe. Could they do that with Falcon Heavy? Definitely. You know, and is that something that we might see on this second mission of the Polaris program? My bet is yes. Jared wouldn't tell me when I asked on that media call. They honestly weren't answering a lot of questions about future plans,

but that's my guess in the future. And another corroborating piece of evidence there would be testing out this Starlink-based communication system, that would be very useful if you're flying over the North and South Poles where there's very little coverage, South Pole specifically, there's very little ground station coverage unless you're going to talk to people down at McMurdo, which would also be cool. But that seems like something you'd want to test out before you go to polar orbit on the second flight of this. Now the Starship Evolve in the future, you know, Jared was doing flybys of Starbase back when they were working on Inspiration4. They just did one in advance of the Starship

update that happened last week. It certainly seemed like that event was setting up for an announcement of a Jared Isaacman-related project, but that didn't pan out at that Starship update last week. I have some theories as to why, uh, you know, there's this NBC news exclusive content that, uh, Jared and team seems to be hooked in on, you know, Tom Costello was the first one that tweeted it out this morning that there was some news coming from Jared Isaacman. I think they had something on the today show. Uh, notably this weekend was pretty packed from an NBC perspective. They had the Olympics, they also had the Super Bowl, so maybe there was the intention that Jared would be there last Thursday to announce this with Elon

Musk at Starbase, and that there would be NBC News coverage of it, and eventually NBC News kicked that to a Monday thing rather than a Thursday or Friday thing. So that whole announcement got shelved. And what it was left with was Elon Musk doing kind of a sort of update of Starship. Not a lot of new info for someone who listens to this show. Very cool to see the full fully stacked Starship there, but not a lot of new info to go on, even though we know that Jared Isaacman and team were flying around down there. So it seems like, you know, there was something within that realm of possibility that pushed this announcement to today, because they are pretty tight-lipped around communications with these Isaacman-based projects. But Starship overall here seems like,

you know, obviously a long pole for development purposes, but it seems they don't really know what to make of it yet, because it's far off. They're just committed to flying on it eventually. They don't really know what the plan would be there. We don't even know how many non-human flights there would be of Starship before this takes effect. But clearly, that's where the sights are set on this program is that human spaceflight is going the direction of Starship. And Jared, much like the rest of this, would like to be positioned to help that development out in the future. And SpaceX, again, clearly sees some usefulness in pushing that storyline along. So while this does have a Starship tie-in, I don't think this story is about Starship. I think it's about we have a privately funded space development program. You know, we have a private version of

the Gemini program going on right now. And it's a partnership between a private individual and a private company. And they're developing capabilities that are going to be used both in the hardware that they're flying today, but also in the hardware that they're developing in the future on Starship, the human landing system that they're developing for NASA, future systems for Mars. This is all leading in that same direction. And it's really interesting to see a private individual saying, you know, I have these things that I would like to do on my bucket list. And it requires something like SpaceX

developing capability to do that. Going to SpaceX saying, is this a capability you're interested in? Because it's something I'm interested in doing and finding that sweet spot. And if both sides are happy with the arrangement, then we're going to get some really cool space missions to watch. And, you know, that's all kind of shrouded in what I thought was fairly good PR efforts from Jared Isaacman and team around Inspiration4. This certainly isn't going to have the same kind of charm as flying, you know, a childhood cancer survivor and people that entered contests to get there and

make it feel like it's just us going to space. This is really becoming serious business with damn near professional astronauts flying to space to do their jobs. In the case of half the crew, that is what they are doing. They are flying up there to do a job. But the seriousness, which with Jared Isaacman and Scott Poteet look at these missions is pretty well matched with SpaceX's attitude around these human spaceflight missions. So, you know, I'm excited to watch these missions. I'm sure we'll hear more in the future. They're fairly tight-lipped around what exactly these missions will entail. But just looking at the list of things that SpaceX is going to be developing for these, you know, kind of tips their hand with what things they want to be doing in the future.

We should be happy to live in a timeline in which SpaceX has found themselves a patron that is interested in continuing to push their development of capabilities in the way that Isaacman and his team are here in the future. So with that, speaking of patrons, I should say thank you to all of you out there

who support Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 778 of you supporting this show every single week, and I'm so thankful for that. That includes 40 executive producers who helped make this episode possible. Thanks to Simon, Lauren, Chris, Pat, Matt, George, Ryan, Donald, Lee, Chris, Warren, Bob, Russell, Moritz, Joel, Jan, David, Eunice, Rob, Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, Frank, Julian and Lars from Agile Space, Tommy, Matt, The Astrogators at SCE, Chris, Aegis Trade Law, Fred, Heymanth, Dawn Aerospace, Andrew, and seven anonymous executive producers. Thank you all so much for your support for making this episode possible. If you want to join that crew and help make this show possible, but also get an entire

other podcast in your feed every week, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you want to join that crew and help make this show possible, but also get an entire other podcast in your feed every week, head over to mainenginecutoff.com slash support. If you're at the $3 a month or more level, you will get access to Miko Headlines. I do a show every weekend with all the stories from space, giving you my thoughts on them, a quick rundown. It's a great way to stay up on the news and help support the show that you like. So thank you all so much for your support. And with that, that is all I've got for you today. so thank you all so much for your support and with that, that is all I've got for you today I will keep an eye on

any Jared Isaacman media availabilities because I've got some more questions and I'm sure you do too, so if you want to send them my way so I can send them his way when we get a chance hit me up on email at anthonymanagingcutoff.com or on Twitter at wehavemiko and until next time, thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon.