SpaceX Managing Director Elon Musk said on Sunday that the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission launched by the company will be “epic” as it will be the first time a private company has attempted a spacewalk.

What happened: The Polaris program is a private manned space program founded by Layer4 Payments Managing Director Jared IsaacmanIt will consist of up to three manned space missions, the first of which will be Polaris Dawn.

The Polaris Dawn mission is scheduled to launch no earlier than August 26 on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and Polaris’ all-civilian crew of four, including mission commander Isaacman, Kidd Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, will spend up to five days in orbit. While Isaacman and Poteet work together at Shift4, Gillis and Menon are both SpaceX engineers.

The goal of the mission is to reach the highest Earth orbit ever and also to test laser-based Starlink communication in space.

The historic spacewalk: The main goal of the mission, however, is to conduct a spacewalk at an altitude of almost 700 kilometers above Earth using an extravehicular activity suit developed by SpaceX – the first commercial spacewalk by an astronaut.

While the space agency NASA routinely conducts spacewalks, no private actor has attempted this before, making this mission a milestone for SpaceX and commercial space companies.

“SpaceX’s first spacewalk mission launches in a week. This is going to be epic. Musk has been writing about the upcoming mission,” Musk said on X. “This is big,” he wrote in another post.

“We are grateful for the opportunity,” Isaacman wrote to Musk.

Why it is important: SpaceX had its first purely civilian space flight in 2021. The mission, called Inspiration4, was also led by Isaacman at the time.

SpaceX is currently the leader in the space segment, outperforming even national agencies. In the first quarter of 2024, SpaceX had 31 launches, outperforming Chinese Society for Aerospace Science and Technology (CASC) with 9 starts and Russia’s Roscosmos which had 5.

SpaceX is now aiming for 144 launches for the entire year.

“SpaceX could launch more than 90 percent of Earth’s total payload into orbit later this year,” Musk said in May.

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Photo courtesy: NASA