SpaceX has blasted off a crew of four private astronauts for the first-ever private spacewalk.
A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees are using the company’s new spacesuits and a redesigned spacecraft for the mission which launched on Tuesday morning from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Image: Pic: SpaceX
It is the riskiest private space mission so far – only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have done spacewalks in the past.
Image: The Polaris Dawn crew at the Kennedy Space Center. File pic: EyePress News/Shutterstock
Image: Pic: SpaceX
An attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before lift-off over a small helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX’s launchpad.
The company fixed the leak, but its Falcon 9 was then grounded by US regulators over a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch.
Risky Polaris mission is neccesary if Musk wants a city on Mars
Astronauts need courage, and never more so than on the Polaris Dawn mission now in orbit around the Earth.
The four crew members are all civilians. Only one has ever been to space before. Just once.
And if that wasn’t enough, the SpaceX Dragon capsule will take them further from Earth than anybody since the Apollo missions, through radiation belts around the planet.
Then the crew will attempt the first spacewalk by private astronauts, testing a new suit in the vacuum of space, from a spacecraft that doesn’t even have an airlock.
The mission is so full of risk it’s a wonder it ever got insurance.
Jared Isaacman, the billionaire commander and funder of the mission, is a space geek.
He believes in humanity’s journey away from our home planet. And the experiments and proof of technology on this flight are part of that.
Isaacman has paid SpaceX for three Polaris missions. He hopes the third will be on Starship, the mega-rocket that Elon Musk hopes will take people to Mars.
He said recently that uncrewed flights should happen in two years.
If they land successfully, astronauts will be on board two years after that and a self-sustaining city will exist on Mars in 20 years.
It sounds far-fetched.
But daring missions like Polaris could make it more likely.
“Crew safety is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual, as it will be the furthest humans have travelled from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spacewalk!,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s chief executive, wrote about the mission last month on his social media site X.
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There have been roughly 270 spacewalks on the International Space Station (ISS) since its creation in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
The SpaceX mission, called Polaris Dawn, will last about five days in an oval-shaped orbit that passes as close to Earth as 190km (118 miles) and as far as 1,400km (870 miles), the furthest any humans will have travelled since the end of the United States’s Apollo moon programme in 1972.
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Now the spacecraft has launched, it will begin a “two-day pre-breathe process” to prepare the crew for their upcoming spacewalk on Thursday.
At least 20 people have been killed and dozens more injured after an Israeli airstrike targeting a school in Gaza, health authorities have said.
Reuters news agency reported the number of dead, citing medics, with the school in the Daraj neighbourhood having been used to shelter displaced people who had fled previous bombardments.
Medical and civil defence sources on the ground confirmed women and children were among the casualties, with several charred bodies arriving at al Shifa and al Ahli hospitals.
The scene inside the school has been described as horrific, with more victims feared trapped under the rubble.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Donald Trump has threatened Russia with more sanctions after a series of deadly strikes across Ukraine, as he said of Vladimir Putin: “What the hell happened to him?”
Speaking to reporters at an airport in New Jersey ahead of a flight back to Washington, Mr Trump said: “I’m not happy with Putin. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“He’s killing a lot of people,” he added. “I’m not happy about that.”
Mr Trump – who said he’s “always gotten along with” Mr Putin – told reporters he would consider more sanctions against Moscow.
“He’s sending rockets into cities and killing people, and I don’t like it at all,” he said.
Ukraine said the barrage of strikes overnight into Sunday was the biggest aerial attack of the war so far, with 367 drones and missiles fired by Russian forces.
It came despite Mr Trump repeatedly talking up the chances of a peace agreement. He even spoke to Mr Putin on the phone for two hours last week.
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Hundreds of drones fired at Ukraine
‘Shameful’ attacks
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine is ready to sign a ceasefire deal, and suggested Russia isn’t serious about signing one.
In a statement after the latest attacks on his country, he urged the US and other national leaders to increase the pressure on Mr Putin, saying silence “only encourages” him.
Mr Trump’s envoy for the country, Keith Kellogg, later demanded a ceasefire, describing the Russian attacks as “shameful”.
Three children were among those killed in the attacks, explosions shaking the cities of Kyiv, Odesa, and Mykolaiv.
Image: Ukrainian siblings Tamara, 12, Stanislav, eight, and Roman, 17, were killed in Russian airstrikes. Pic: X/@Mariana_Betsa
Before the onslaught, Russia said it had faced a Ukrainian drone attack on Sunday. It said around 100 were intercepted and destroyed near Moscow and in central and southern regions.
The violence has escalated despite Russia and Ukraine completing the exchange of 1,000 prisoners each over the past three days.
Donald Trump says he will delay the imposition of 50% tariffs on goods entering the United States from the European Union until July, as the two sides attempt to negotiate a trade deal.
It comes after the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said in a post on social media site X that she had spoken to Mr Trump and expressed that they needed until 9 July to “reach a good deal”.
But Mr Trump has now said that date has been put back to 9 July to allow more time for negotiations with the 27-member bloc, with the phone call appearing to smooth over tensions for now at least.
Speaking on Sunday before boarding Air Force One for Washington DC, Mr Trump told reporters that he had spoken to Ms Von der Leyen and she “wants to get down to serious negotiations” and she vowed to “rapidly get together and see if we can work something out”.
The US president, in comments on his Truth Social platform, had reignited fears last Friday of a trade war between the two powers when he said talks were “going nowhere” and the bloc was “very difficult to deal with”.
Mr Trump told the media in Morristown, New Jersey, on Sunday that Ms Von der Leyen “just called me… and she asked for an extension in the June 1st date. And she said she wants to get down to serious negotiation”.
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“We had a very nice call and I agreed to move it. I believe July 9th would be the date. That was the date she requested. She said we will rapidly get together and see if we can work something out,” the US president added.
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12 May: US and China reach agreement on tariffs
Much of his most incendiary rhetoric on trade has been directed at Brussels, though, even going as far as to claim the EU was created to rip the US off.
Responding to his 50% tariff threat, EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic said: “EU-US trade is unmatched and must be guided by mutual respect, not threats.