SpaceX pushes launch of daring Polaris Dawn mission back to Wednesday. Meet the 4-person crew

SpaceX’s latest attempt to push the cosmic boundaries is set to kick off this week with a mission called Polaris Dawn: a nail-biting, five-day trek to orbit with a crew of private astronauts traveling into Earth’s radiation belts and hoping to conduct the first commercial spacewalk.

The mission is slated to take off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida between 3:38 and 7:09 a.m. ET Wednesday — a 24-hour delay from the company’s previous launch target — carrying four civilians on the daring excursion.

SpaceX said in a social media post Monday evening that it pushed the launch time back in order to take “a closer look at a ground-side helium leak” on a piece a equipment designed to detach from the rocket during takeoff.

It will mark the second trip to space for Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments platform company Shift4. He made a less risky journey in 2021 on a mission dubbed Inspiration4.

Polaris Dawn is one in a series of missions that Isaacman plans to carry out alongside SpaceX — three flights aiming to test new technologies that can help advance the Elon Musk-led company’s goal of seeing humans live and work on other planets.

Joining Isaacman on Polaris Dawn will be two SpaceX engineers, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, the first from the company to join a mission to orbit. Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former United States Air Force pilot and longtime friend of Isaacman’s, rounds out the crew.

Members of the crew come to the mission with extensive experience piloting jet aircraft — a common career before becoming a professional astronaut — or have worked with and trained NASA astronauts, as is the case for Menon and Gillis.