Billionaire space travel ‘dangerous’

Jared Isaacman is about to go where no billionaire has gone before. The entrepreneur is making his second trip to space, this time a “longer, more daring and risky” trip that includes a spacewalk in high Earth orbit, he said. The New York Times. A trip aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule would be a “purely commercial venture” with a crew of private-sector astronauts; NASA has nothing to do with this mission. But it’s not just a bystander, say all involved. “The real focus is what we get and what we learn from it,” Isaacman said.

He said his journey was “the most ambitious – and dangerous – private spaceflight ever”. Scientific American. The expedition, called “Polaris Dawn,” will head toward the Van Allen radiation belt surrounding the planet in an “ultrahigh” orbit (no humans have flown since the Apollo moon missions) at an altitude of more than 800 miles. Effects of radiation on humans. Later, it will conduct the first private spacewalk. The overarching purpose of all this? To lay the groundwork for Elon Musk’s planned mission to Mars. “It’s time to go out,” said SpaceX’s Bill Gerstenmeyer. “It’s time to explore.”

‘Expanding Human Activities in Space’