The first commercial spacewalk mission looks to be back on schedule with Polaris Dawn saying that it will launch no earlier than July 31, 2024. The Dragon spacecraft is slated to carry the four-person crew farther from Earth than any mission in over 50 years.
Commercial space flights mean a lot more than private firms filling government space contracts. Though most private missions today carry cargo and crews to and from the International Space Station (ISS), the future will see more and more private visits to orbit that have nothing to do with national governments.
On September 15, 2021, the first completely private mission in history, a privately owned and operated rocket putting a privately owned and operated spacecraft into orbit with private astronauts aboard on a private charter, lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The craft was a SpaceX Crew Dragon and the launch vehicle a Falcon 9 rocket that boosted the Inspiration4 mission to an altitude of 357 miles (575 km).
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