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Record-setting Polaris Dawn crew aims for early Sunday splashdown in Gulf of Mexico
The Polaris Dawn crew closed out a record-setting commercial spaceflight and packed up Saturday for re-entry and a pre-dawn splashdown early Sunday in the Gulf of Mexico northwest of Key West, Florida.
Flying along a southwest-to-northeast trajectory, the Crew Dragon capsule, carrying billionaire Jared Isaacman, pilot Scott Poteet and company engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, is expected to fire its braking rockets at 2:40 a.m. EDT Sunday to drop out of orbit.
Plunging back into the discernible atmosphere, the Crew Dragon’s protective heat shield will endure temperatures as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit before the ship slows enough to deploy its parachutes. Splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico near Dry Tortugas, Florida, is expected around 3:36 a.m.
SpaceX
A SpaceX recovery ship is stationed nearby to recover the capsule and help the crew members out of the spacecraft for routine post-landing medical checks before a helicopter flight to shore and reunions with family and friends.
The Polaris Dawn mission, financed by Isaacman, in cooperation with SpaceX, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center atop a Falcon 9 rocket early Tuesday. Right off the bat, the crew set a new altitude record for a piloted spacecraft in Earth orbit, reaching a high point, or apogee, of 875 miles.
That’s farther from Earth than anyone has flown since the final Apollo voyage to the moon in 1972.
Early Thursday, the crew set another record when Isaacman and Gillis took turns floating just outside the capsule’s hatch in the first non-government spacewalk ever conducted.
“Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman marveled, taking in a spectacular view of the borderless planet below as he floated through the Crew Dragon’s hatch.
The goal of the brief excursions was to test the SpaceX-designed pressure suits in the harsh environment of space, assessing their mobility and checking the motion of wrist, elbow and shoulder joints to help engineers design improved versions for future flights to the moon and, eventually, Mars.
Along with a full slate of biomedical research, the crew also tested laser communications technology linking the Crew Dragon to the Starlink constellation of commercial internet relay satellites.
“Early this morning via @Starlink space lasers, the Polaris Dawn crew chatted with SpaceX teams over coffee and donuts,” SpaceX posted on X Saturday. “During the 40+ minute uninterrupted video call, Dragon completed half an orbit over the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., cutting southeast over the Atlantic Ocean and rounding the Cape of Good Hope.”
Earlier in the mission, Gillis, an accomplished violist, participated in what amounted to an international concert, performing composer John Williams’ “Star Wars” song “Rey’s Theme,” accompanied by young musicians in the United States, Brazil, Venezuela, Haiti, Sweden and Uganda.
The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three planned by Isaacman, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, in cooperation with Musk.
The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission while the third will be the first piloted flight of SpaceX’s huge Super Heavy-Starship rocket, now under development in Texas.
It’s not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX funded on its own.
Polaris Dawn is SpaceX’s fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and its 14th including NASA missions carrying crew members to the International Space Station. The California rocket builder has now launched 54 men and women to orbit since piloted flights began in May 2020.
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“Beyond the Gates” cast announced: Tamara Tunie, Daphnee Duplaix, Karla Mosley star in Black-led CBS daytime drama
CBS has announced the first cast members for “Beyond the Gates,” which will become the first one-hour Black daytime soap to air on TV when it premieres early next year.
The show, set in an affluent Maryland suburb, centers around the Duprees, a prominent, multigenerational family. Tamara Tunie, Daphnee Duplaix and Karla Mosley have been cast as three key members of the Dupree family: the family matriarch and her two daughters.
Emilio Madrid; Getty Images; Karla Mosley
Tunie will star as Anita Dupree, a famous singer who raised two daughters with her husband, a former senator. Tunie starred as attorney Jessica Griffin on “As the World Turns” and as Dr. Melinda Warner on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
Duplaix will play the role of Dr. Nicole Dupree Richardson, Anita’s psychiatrist daughter whose life appears perfect from the outside. Duplaix is best known for her role on “One Life to Live” as Rachel Gannon, which earned her an NAACP Award nomination.
Mosley will portray Anita’s other daughter, Dani Dupree, an ex-model-turned-momager. Mosley was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for her role as Maya Avant Forrester on “The Bold and the Beautiful.”
“Beyond the Gates” will be the first new daytime drama to debut since “Passions” premiered in 1999.
Dania Beach, Fla. — Scientists have moved about about 300 endangered sea corals from South Florida to the Texas Gulf Coast for research and restoration.
Nova Southeastern University and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi researchers packed up the corals Wednesday at the NSU’s Oceanographic Campus in Dania Beach. The sea creatures were then loaded onto a van, taken to a nearby airport and flown to Texas.
Researchers were taking extreme caution with the transfer of these delicate corals, NSU researcher Shane Wever said.
“The process that we’re undertaking today is a really great opportunity for us to expand the representation of the corals that we are working with and the locations where they’re stored,” Wever said. “Increasing the locations that they’re stored really acts as safeguards for us to protect them and to preserve them for the future.”
Each coral was packaged with fresh clean sea water and extra oxygen, inside a protective case and inside insulated and padded coolers and was in transport for the shortest time possible.
NSU’s marine science research facility serves as a coral reef nursery, where rescued corals are stored, processed for restoration and transplanted back into the ocean. The school has shared corals with other universities, like the University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University and Texas State University, as well as the Coral Restoration Foundation in the Florida Keys.
Despite the importance of corals, it’s easy for people living on land to forget how important things in the ocean are, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi researcher Keisha Bahr said.
David Fischer / AP
“Corals serve a lot of different purposes,” Bahr said. “First of all, they protect our coastlines, especially here in Florida, from wave energy and coastal erosion. They also supply us with a lot of the food that we get from our oceans. And they are nurseries for a lot of the organisms that come from the sea.”
Abnormally high ocean temperatures caused widespread coral bleaching in 2023, wiping out corals in the Florida Keys. Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi turned to NSU when its partners in the Keys were no longer able to provide corals for its research. Broward County was spared from the majority of the 2023 bleaching so the NSU offshore coral nursery had healthy corals to donate.
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“We’re losing corals at an alarming rate,” Bahr said. “We lost about half of our corals in last three decades. So we need to make sure that we continue to have these girls into the future.”
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi is using some of these corals to study the effects of sediment from Port Everglades on coral health. The rest will either help the university with its work creating a bleaching guide for the Caribbean or act as a genetic bank, representing nearly 100 genetically distinct Staghorn coral colonies from across South Florida’s reefs.
“We wanted to give them as many genotypes, which are genetic individuals, as we could to really act as a safeguard for these this super important species,” Wever said.
