SpaceX Will Test Eyes, Motion Sickness For Mars Missions In 2024's Biggest Private Astronaut Launch

With rapid Falcon 9 launches and Starship development in Texas taking place in the background, SpaceX shared fresh details for its upcoming record-setting private astronaut mission under the Polaris program yesterday. The Polaris Dawn mission, which is a four-crew complement led by billionaire Jared Issacman, is currently due to fly to space in the summer, and Isaacman, along with SpaceX representatives, shared details of the flight and mission profile during a chat on social media yesterday. At the event, SpaceX's Ana Menon outlined that her firm aims to test human performance for Mars missions as part of a journey that will be the highest that humans have flown in orbit since the early days of NASA's human exploration efforts.

SpaceX Will Test Human Eyes To Help Avoid Vision Problems From Long Duration Spaceflight

The Polaris Dawn mission is SpaceX's all-out effort to push the boundary of human spaceflight and develop an independent arm of the Crew Dragon program. SpaceX's long-term goal is to not only populate Mars with the help of the Starship rocket but also to substitute commercial jetliners for point-to-point flights on Earth. As part of this, it will have to create a customer-facing arm similar to a commercial airliner, and efforts like the Polaris program enable SpaceX to compete with private spaceflight providers such as Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic.

Polaris Dawn will see astronauts fly a higher orbit than any other crewed mission since the Gemini XI flight in 1966, and it will also see privately developed extravehicular activity (EVA) suits fly a strenuous mission for the first time. A major portion of SpaceX's reveal covered its custom-designed EVA suits for the mission, and these will be crucial to ensure that Isaacman and his crew can safely return to Earth.

The spacesuits are fed oxygen and other consumables from the ship, which limits the spacewalks by the Polaris Dawn mission to two hours. Their mission is also the first time that a privately trained crew will conduct a spacewalk since all previous similar missions have been done by government space agencies.

SpaceX's Anna Menon, the mission's medical specialist, highlighted some of the human-centered tests planned for the mission. According to her, SpaceX selected forty proposals from ideas all over the world based primarily on their ability to meet the mission's altitude and other constraints. She also provided added details for some such experiments:

So one is that we will be taking advantage of our flying at a really high altitude in order to better understand that radiation environment. While we're up there we will be actually using a camera to try to harness the radiation environment and see if we can perform kind of an initial test of capturing X ray images using that environment that we're sitting in. This could be really beneficial down the road if we're able to perform initial demonstrations, and if you envision you know going to Mars one day, you  would want to be able to have medical diagnostic capabilities that are small and really agile to support the humans living there.

Other experiments that we'll perform are ones on space motion sickness. We will try to better understand what are the mechanisms and causes, causing this. When people fly to space, about sixty percent of people get afflicted by space motion sickness. And if you envision, what that looks like if you were to take a whole bunch of people into space, and that means that a whole bunch of people could be sick and not feeling great during their initial adaptation to that microgravity environment.

. another set of experiments that we're really excited about is as a group we're all focusing on spaceflight associated neural occular syndrome. We will be testing our eyes to better understand why vision problems arise during long duration microgravity exposure. A lot of astronauts face vision changes after extended duration spaceflight, if you envision flying nine months to Mars and you land there and you can't see well, you're not going to be able to work well.

Polaris Dawn will launch into a highly elliptical orbit with a 190-kilometer perigee and a 1,200-kilometer apogee. The apogee will be raised to 1,400 kilometers, which is the highest any human has flown since the Apollo program, according to Menon. Her mission will also be the first time astronauts will conduct an EVA with Crew Dragon, and SpaceX's Sarah Gillis, also flying, shared some changes made to Crew Dragon for the mission.

She explained that the interior of the Dragon has to be "down to vacuum" pressure for the spacewalk as the capsule does not have an airlock. To ensure that the ship is capable of operating in this environment, SpaceX had to evaluate the performance of all materials in the environment. Gillis added that to repressurize the ship after the walk, the firm will use a brand new nitrogen re-pressurization system.

To help the crew move in a vacuum, mobility aids like a "new structure outside the top of the forward hatch" called a 'skywalker' will be installed. Skywalker will replace the cupola flown on previous private Dragon missions, and it will account for extreme temperature changes in the space environment.

A special part of SpaceX's new spacesuits is the helmet. A helmet is often one of the most complicated components of any high-performance suit, and SpaceX's helmet will feature real-time information such as suit pressure and temperature. The coating on the visor uses a similar material and coating as the Dragon's cupola window, and overall, the suits will be essential in helping the crew avoid nitrogen sickness called the 'bends' due to their spacewalks.