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SpaceX marks milestone with billionaire's space walk, first by private citizen. What to know
A SpaceX rocket was set to blast off early Tuesday morning on a mission to reach a new milestone in human spaceflight: the first walk in space by private citizens.
A Falcon 9 rocket was schedule to lift off from Kennedy Space Center, carrying mission commander Jared Isaacman, a fintech billionaire, and three other crew members, including two SpaceX employees. They will reach the highest Earth orbit since the Apollo program.
Here’s what to know about the Polaris Dawn mission, which is scheduled to last five days and end with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.
Why is this mission such a big deal?
The crew is expected to carry out the first commercial space walk during its time in orbit, testing a new generation of mobile space suits that SpaceX says will be necessary to colonize the moon and Mars. The sleek Extravehicular Activity suits have been in development for several years and are designed to withstand the rigors of space. The walk is set to be conducted on the mission’s third day.
What spacecraft will carry the Polaris Dawn crew?
The crew will be aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The spacecraft was designed to service the International Space Station and was developed by Elon Musk’s Hawthorne company (which recently announced it was relocating its headquarters to Texas) after it received a $2.6-billion contract from NASA in 2014. On Saturday, NASA announced another Crew Dragon capsule would pick up and return to Earth two astronauts stranded on the space station because of problems with Boeing’s rival Starliner capsule.
How risky is this mission?
All spaceflight is risky, from launch to the upper-stage maneuvers that place a spacecraft in orbit, to the return to Earth, which requires passing through the atmosphere at temperatures exceeding 3,500 degrees. Additionally, a space walk exposes astronauts to the vacuum and hazards of space, which they could not survive without their suits. However, the astronauts will be tethered to the Crew Dragon capsule, and despite the inherent risks of a space walk, there never has been a human casualty during a walk since they were pioneered in the 1960s.
Who funded the mission?
Polaris Dawn is the first flight of the Polaris Program, a private space program funded by Isaacman, a 41-year-old American entrepreneur who founded Shift4 Payments, a Pennsylvania company that processes payments for multiple industries. His net worth is estimated at $1.9 billion. The program involves two more commercial human spaceflights. He has not said how much the mission costs.
What kind of aerospace experience does Isaacman have?
Isaacman is an experienced jet pilot who has flown in air shows and set records for around-the-world flights in 2008 and 2009. He funded and was the commander of Inspiration4, the first all-civilian space mission in September 2021, also carried out by SpaceX on a Crew Dragon capsule.
Who are the other crew members on the mission?
The pilot is Scott “Kidd” Poteet, 50, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has logged 400 hours of combat flight time and has served as an executive at Shift4. The medical officer is Anna Menon, an operations engineer at SpaceX who has worked on the Dragon program. Mission specialist Sarah Gillis also is an operations specialist at SpaceX who oversees the company’s astronaut training program.
This is the first spaceflight for all three. The crew has been training for two years, including skydiving at the U.S. Air Force Academy and experiencing zero-gravity flight, similar to what NASA astronauts go through. They even hiked to the summit of Cotopaxi, a nearly 20,000-foot peak in Ecuador.
How will the space walk be carried out?
The crew will attempt the space walk while the Crew Dragon is roughly 430 miles above Earth, putting it nearly 200 miles higher than the International Space Station. SpaceX says that colonizing the moon and Mars will require the production of thousands, if not millions, of space suits, and that this is the first iteration of one that can do the job.
The form-fitting suits looks little like the bulky suits NASA astronauts have long used to weather the harsh space environment. Those suits include packs that allow astronauts to survive in space without support from a spacecraft. The Polaris Dawn astronauts will receive their life support from long hoses. Due to the lack of an airlock on the Crew Dragon, the 13-foot-wide capsule will be depressurized and exposed to space during the walk. However, only Isaacman and Gillis will “walk” outside the craft.
Are there other scientific goals for the mission?
The Crew Dragon capsule will be launched into a highly elliptical, or oval-shaped, orbit that at 870 miles above Earth will take it through portions of the Van Allen radiation belts, zones of highly charged solar particles with varying radiation levels. Scientific research will be conducted throughout the mission to better understand human health during long-duration spaceflights, such as a flight to Mars. Multiple universities are collaborating on the research, including USC, Johns Hopkins and Cornell.
Will there be any other benefits to the mission?
The crew will test SpaceX’s Starlink communications system — which provides satellite-based high-speed internet to residential customers — for space communications. There also is a philanthropic component. The three-day Inspiration4 mission raised more than $250 million for cancer research at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. This flight is also raising money for the same cause.
What do we know about the two other Polaris Program flights?
Those flights also are expected to be led by Isaacman. For the final flight, SpaceX would like to switch from its workhouse Falcon 9 rocket to its giant Starship rocket, which is taller and with more thrust than the Saturn V that propelled the Apollo astronauts to the moon. But the rocket is still in its development phase, so whether that is possible will be determined by the success of future Starship test flights.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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