SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket takes off on private spacewalk mission

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPACE) launched its Falcon 9 rocket in the early morning hours of Tuesday on a first-of-its-kind private space mission.

This will be the “furthest from Earth that humans have been in over half a century,” said the billionaire chief of SpaceX (SPACE) and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) in a post on X.

The five-day Polaris Dawn mission will take a crew of four, including billionaire Jared Isaacman, aboard the Dragon spacecraft on a low-Earth orbit. The crew will attempt to reach the highest Earth orbit since NASA’s Apollo program and the first-ever spacewalk by commercial astronauts.

The crew includes pilot Kidd Poteet, mission specialist Sarah Gillis and medical officer Anna Menon. Isaacman previously flew to space as commander of Inspiration4. This will also be the first time two SpaceX employees will be part of a human spaceflight crew, providing valuable insight to future missions on the road to making life multiplanetary.

The spacewalk is scheduled for late Wednesday or Thursday. The spacecraft will attempt to reach an altitude of 870 miles and stay there for 10 hours before reducing the orbit by half to 435 miles, which would still be higher than the International Space Station or Hubble Space Telescope, the highest altitude flown by NASA’s space shuttle astronauts.

The mission also involves testing Starlink laser-based communications in space.