SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn crew returns to Earth victorious, making huge gains in Elon Musk’s plans to send humans to Mars

If you ask Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who funded and commanded the mission, it was also in the name of raising funds for childhood-cancer research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

As he previously told Business Insider, before his first flight with SpaceX in 2021, he wanted to “take care of some of the problems that we have here on Earth, so we earn the right to go and explore among the stars.”

Five days after launch, they had officially completed the most daring crewed commercial spaceflight yet.

Spacewalks and spacesuits for Mars

The main event of the mission was its spacewalk.

“There’s going to be an armada of Starships arriving on Mars at some point in the future,” he added. “Those people are going to have to be able to get out of it and walk around and do important things.”

Radiation on the way to Mars

Polaris Dawn also tackled another big challenge for crewed Mars missions: extreme radiation exposure. People traveling to Mars would be exposed to immense amounts of space radiation for months.

So the Crew Dragon spacecraft flew through two donuts of intense radiation surrounding Earth, called the Van Allen belts. The crew conducted tests and measurements to see how it affected their bodies.

“If we get to Mars someday, we’d love to be able to come back and be healthy enough to tell people about it,” Isaacman said in August.

Other medical experiments on the mission checked their eyes, veins, and airways, to help SpaceX better understand the impacts of long-distance spaceflight.

Communications for Mars

Polaris Dawn also tested laser-based communications using Starlink, the network of internet satellites that SpaceX has built throughout Earth’s orbit.

The commercial astronauts posted on X mid-mission, saying they’d uploaded their photos there using Starlink internet.

Those space lasers lay the groundwork for future communications with deep-space missions — that is, as the Polaris website says, “for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond.”

Isaacman seems to be vested in making that happen.

“I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars and venturing out and exploring our solar system,” he said ahead of the launch.