“We can make huge strides for our collective future,” Anna Menon said.
Four civilian astronauts blasted off into space on Tuesday, Sept. 10 — launching from Cape Canaveral, Fla., en route, they hope, to fly deeper into the cosmos (870 miles, to be exact) than any other since the Gemini 11 took off in 1966.
Early on Thursday, Sept. 12, the crew of SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission will attempt the first all-civilian spacewalk. (Observers can watch along online.)
Over five days, they’re also planning dozens of studies and experiments while in orbit to help understand the effects of spaceflight and radiation on humans.
“This is a stepping stone,” Anna Menon, a SpaceX mission specialist and medical officer, told PEOPLE earlier this year as she and the other astronauts prepared for takeoff. “It’s helping to build technologies that will get humans closer to Mars and beyond.”
Menon will be joined by commander Jared Isaacman, a billionaire tech entrepreneur who is funding the flight, as well as pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and Sarah Gillis, another mission specialist.
Isaacman previously led SpaceX’s Inspiration4 in 2021. He has told PEOPLE that the flights are “small steps in opening this last frontier. There is so much we stand to learn.”
Both he and Gillis plan to go outside their capsule on the spacewalk, though all four will technically participate because they will be exposed to the void of space.
“We hope to inspire future generations,” Gillis previously told PEOPLE.
For his part, Poteet, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, has said his discipline in stressful situations and his bond with the team will serve him well.
The crew of the Polaris Dawn mission launches from Florida on Sept. 10.
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty
The Polaris Dawn expedition was pushed back several years as the team worked to fine-tune the dizzying array of technology they needed, including suits for the crew to wear outside their capsule as it travels 17,500 mph in temperatures ranging from 250 degrees below zero to 250 degrees above. (They won’t feel the velocity in the same way as on Earth.)
Past astronauts have recounted a curious detail from their trips, insisting that space sometimes smells like gunpowder or burnt food. What does the Polaris Dawn crew expect?
“I’ll let you know,” Menon told PEOPLE, “when we come back.
Once the group is floating among the stars, there is another goal: “I’m going to read a children’s book I wrote, Kisses from Space, to both my kids as well as some of the brave kids at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,” Menon said of a live feed to raise funds for the Tennessee-based health care facility that focuses on childhood cancer and other pediatric diseases.
The Inspiration4 pulled in more than $250 million and Menon said they want to add to that: “We can make huge strides for our collective future but also address the problems here on Earth today.”
