The Crew Dragon spacecraft spent yesterday circling Earth at least six times in an oval-shaped orbit as shallow on one end as 118 miles and stretching out as far as 870 miles, the farthest in space humans have travelled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.
The first US spacewalk was in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, and used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurised, the hatch opened, and a spacesuited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.The private Polaris astronauts during the mission will be key subjects for a range of scientific research into how the human body reacts to deep space, adding to decades of astronaut health studies enabled by government astronauts on the ISS.