A daredevil billionaire rocketed back into orbit Tuesday, aiming to perform the first private spacewalk and venture farther than anyone since NASA’s Apollo moonshots.

Unlike his previous chartered flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman shared the cost with SpaceX this time around, which included developing and testing brand new spacesuits to see how they’ll hold up in the harsh vacuum.

If all goes as planned, it will be the first time private citizens conduct a spacewalk, but they won’t venture away from the capsule. Considered one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight, spacewalks have been the sole realm of professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union popped open the hatch in 1965, closely followed by the U.S. Today, they are routinely done at the International Space Station.

Isaacman, along with a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, midway through the five-day flight.

But first the passengers are shooting for way beyond the International Space Station—an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), which would surpass the Earth-lapping record set during NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured farther.

The plan is to spend 10 hours at that height—filled with extreme radiation and riddled with debris—before reducing the oval-shaped orbit by half. Even at this lower 435 miles (700 kilometers), the orbit would eclipse the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest shuttle astronauts flew.

All four wore SpaceX’s spacewalking suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to the dangerous environment.

Isaacman and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis will take turns briefly popping out of the hatch. They’ll test their white and black-trimmed custom suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot touching the capsule or attached support structure that resembles the top of a pool ladder. There will be no dangling at the end of their 12-foot (3.6-meter) tethers and no jetpack showboating. Only NASA’s suits at the space station come equipped with jetpacks, for emergency use only.

Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX’s Anna Menon will monitor the spacewalk from inside. Like SpaceX’s previous astronaut flights, this one will end with a splashdown off the Florida coast.

“We’re sending you hugs from the ground,” Launch Director Frank Messina radioed after the crew reached orbit. “May you make history and come home safely.”

Isaacman replied: “We wouldn’t be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back at SpaceX and everyone else cheering us on.”

At a preflight news conference, Isaacman—CEO and founder of the credit card processing company Shift4—refused to say how much he invested in the flight. “Not a chance,” he said.

SpaceX teamed up with Isaacman to pay for spacesuit development and associated costs, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president who once headed space mission operations for NASA.

“We’re really starting to push the frontiers with the private sector,” Gerstenmaier said.

It’s the first of three trips that Isaacman bought from Elon Musk 2 1/2 years ago, soon after returning from his first private SpaceX spaceflight in 2021. Isaacman bankrolled that tourist ride for an undisclosed sum, taking along contest winners and a childhood cancer survivor. The trip raised hundreds of millions for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Spacesuit development took longer than anticipated, delaying this first so-called Polaris Dawn flight until now. Training was extensive; Poteet said it rivaled anything he experienced during his Air Force flying career.

As SpaceX astronaut trainers, Gillis and Menon helped Isaacman and his previous team—as well as NASA’s professional crews—prepare for their rides.

“I wasn’t alive when humans walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars, and venturing out and exploring our solar system,” the 41-year-old Isaacman said before liftoff.

Poor weather caused a two-week delay. The crew needed favorable forecasts not only for launch, but for splashdown days later. With limited supplies and no ability to reach the space station, they had no choice but to wait for conditions to improve.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission, a daring multiday orbital expedition that will feature the first-ever spacewalk by private citizens, is targeting liftoff early Tuesday, though weather could play spoilsport.

A four-member crew, led by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Iscaacman, is also aiming to fly deeper into space than any other manned mission in more than half a century, reaching a peak altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers).

“SpaceX is targeting Tuesday, September 10 at 3:38 am ET (0738 GMT) for Falcon 9’s launch of Polaris Dawn to low-Earth orbit from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida,” SpaceX said in a news release.

There are two additional launch opportunities within a four-hour window, at 0923 GMT and 1109 GMT—but the weather is currently only 40 percent favorable. SpaceX will carry a webcast on its website beginning roughly three-and-a-half hours before liftoff.

If they launch, the highlight of the mission will be the first spacewalk composed entirely of non-professional astronauts, who will be wearing sleek, newly developed SpaceX extravehicular activity (EVA) suits outfitted with heads-up displays, helmet cameras, and an advanced joint mobility system.

On the first day of their mission the craft will travel so high that it will briefly enter the Van Allen radiation belt, a region teeming with high-energy charged particles that can pose health risks to humans over extended periods.

The mission has been delayed several times, initially due to a technical issue with the launch tower and since then because of weather constraints.

The Crew Dragon capsule will not dock with the International Space Station, which is why the weather needs to be favorable during both the launch and splashdown phase, around six days after liftoff.

Two years’ preparation

Isaacman has declined to reveal his total investment in the project, though reports suggest he paid around $200 million for the SpaceX Inspiration4 mission in September 2021, the first all-civilian orbital mission.

Rounding out the team are mission pilot Scott Poteet, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel; mission specialist Sarah Gillis, a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX; and mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon, also a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX.

The quartet underwent more than two years of training in preparation for the landmark mission, logging hundreds of hours on simulators as well as skydiving, centrifuge training, scuba diving, and summiting an Ecuadorian volcano.

Polaris Dawn is set to be the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman, the founder of tech company Shift4 Payments, and SpaceX.

Also on their to-do list are testing laser-based satellite communication between the spacecraft and Starlink, SpaceX’s more than 6,000-strong constellation of internet satellites, in a bid to boost space communication speeds, and conducting 36 scientific experiments.

Among these are tests with contact lenses embedded with microelectronics to continuously monitor changes in eye pressure and shape.

© 2024 AFP

The world has not hit the brakes on methane emissions, a powerful driver of climate change. More than 150 nations have pledged to slash by 30% this decade under a global methane pledge, but new research shows global methane emissions over the past five years have risen faster than ever.

The trend “cannot continue if we are to maintain a habitable climate,” the researchers write in a Sept. 10 perspective article in Environmental Research Letters published alongside data in Earth System Science Data. Both papers are the work of the Global Carbon Project, an initiative chaired by Stanford University scientist Rob Jackson that tracks greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Atmospheric concentrations of methane are now more than 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times—the highest they’ve been in at least 800,000 years. Methane emission rates continue to rise along the most extreme trajectory used in emission scenarios by the world’s leading climate scientists.

The current path leads to global warming above 3 degrees Celsius or 5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century. “Right now, the goals of the Global Methane Pledge seem as distant as a desert oasis,” said Jackson, who is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and lead author of the Environmental Research Letters paper. “We all hope they aren’t a mirage.”

More methane from fossil fuels, agriculture, and waste

Methane is a short-lived but highly potent greenhouse gas that comes from natural sources like wetlands and human or “anthropogenic” sources such as agriculture, fossil fuels, and landfills. During the first 20 years after release, methane heats the atmosphere nearly 90 times faster than carbon dioxide, making it a key target for limiting global warming in the near term.

Despite growing policy focus on methane, however, total annual methane emissions have increased by 61 million tons or 20% over the past two decades, according to the new estimates. Increases are being driven primarily by growth of emissions from coal mining, oil and gas production and use, cattle and sheep ranching, and decomposing food and organic waste in landfills.

“Only the European Union and possibly Australia appear to have decreased methane emissions from human activities over the past two decades,” said Marielle Saunois of the Université Paris-Saclay in France and lead author of the Earth System Science Data paper. “The largest regional increases have come from China and southeast Asia.”

In 2020, the most recent year for which complete data are available, nearly 400 million tons or 65% of global methane emissions came directly from human activities, with agriculture and waste contributing about two tons of methane for every ton from the fossil fuel industry. According to the researchers, human-caused emissions continued to increase through at least 2023.

Assessing pandemic impacts

Our atmosphere accumulated nearly 42 million tons of methane in 2020—twice the amount added on average each year during the 2010s, and more than six times the increase seen during the first decade of the 2000s.

Pandemic lockdowns in 2020 reduced transport-related emissions of nitrogen oxides (NO_x), which typically worsen local air quality but prevent some methane from accumulating in the atmosphere. The temporary decline in NO_x pollution accounts for about half of the increase in atmospheric methane concentrations that year—illustrating the complex entanglements of air quality and climate change.

“We’re still trying to understand the full effects of COVID lockdowns on the global methane budget,” said Jackson. “COVID changed nearly everything—from fossil fuel use to emissions of other gases that alter the lifetime of methane in the atmosphere.”

Quantifying humans’ influence on methane from wetlands and waterways

The Global Carbon Project scientists have made an important change in their latest accounting of global methane sources and “sinks,” which include forests and soils that remove and store methane from the atmosphere.

In previous assessments, they categorized all methane from wetlands, lakes, ponds, and rivers as natural. But the new methane budget makes a first attempt to estimate the growing amount of emissions from these types of sources that result from human influences and activities.

For instance, reservoirs built by people lead to an estimated 30 million tons of methane emitted per year, because newly submerged organic matter releases methane as it decomposes.

“Emissions from reservoirs behind dams are as much a direct human source as methane emissions from a cow or an oil and gas field,” said Jackson, who published a new book about methane and climate solutions titled Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere (Scribner) in July.

The scientists estimate that about a third of wetland and freshwater methane emissions in recent years were influenced by human-caused factors including reservoirs and emissions increased by fertilizer runoff, wastewater, land use, and rising temperatures.

After a summer when severe weather and heat waves have given a glimpse of the extremes predicted in our changing climate, the authors write, “The world has reached the threshold of 1.5C increases in global average surface temperature, and is only beginning to experience the full consequences.”