Polaris 2 Mission

Building a bridge to Starship

Polaris Dawn was a picture perfect mission, the first in the Polaris Program, with each mission building on the achievements of the last. For the next mission, SpaceX offered to send Dragon to the Hubble Space Telescope, to perform some overdue maintenance before boosting it to a more sustainable orbit. Sadly NASA declined their offer, which leaves Polaris with an open schedule for the next flight.

The Polaris Program is funded by the billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, who invested $160m for each Polaris mission, in order to start his own space business sometime in the future. SpaceX is happy to support this enterprise because each flight can be used to prepare for Starship operations to new worlds, like the moon and Mars.

“Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require thousands of spacesuits; the development of this suit and the execution of the EVA will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions.” ~ Polaris Program

Hence it seems likely the Polaris 2 mission will involve Dragon docking with Starship in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), something Jared has intimated in the past. Certainly an orbital rendezvous with Starship would be a suitable bridging mission to Polaris 3, which will be the first crew launch of Starship.

Polaris Dawn achieved a lot, proving Dragon’s reliability under challenging conditions, but there’s still a mountain to climb before Starship can begin to ferry people to new worlds. Hence putting a Polaris crew onboard Starship seems a good first step, which allows them to use it like a temporary space station, to carry out more detailed work.

Dragon docks with HLS Starship in low Earth orbit, credit dtrford

LEO rendezvous