Washington: American industrialist Elon Musk's company SpaceX has launched the Polaris Dawn mission. However, the launch was delayed by about two hours due to weather. This mission will last for five days. Four astronauts, including a billionaire entrepreneur, flew on Tuesday.

The purpose of this mission is to test new spacesuit designs. Let us tell you that this will be the world's first private spacewalk. All the passengers flew in SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule. This is the same capsule through which NASA is planning to bring Sunita Williams back from space.

These four people took flight

The crew includes a billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees. The capsule carried billionaire Jared Isaacman, mission pilot Scott Poteet, SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. Scott Poteet is a retired lieutenant colonel of the US Air Force.

Gillis and Anna Menon are senior engineers at SpaceX. Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft and do a spacewalk while Poteet and Menon will remain in the cabin. The four astronauts will also conduct scientific tests there. An attempt will be made to know how cosmic radiation and space affect the human body.

Fifth risky mission

This is Crew Dragon's fifth and most risky private mission so far. After reaching space a few minutes after launch, the spacecraft will be established in an oval-shaped orbit. The spacecraft will pass as close as 190 km to Earth and at a distance of 1,400 km.

This will be the longest distance covered by humans in space since America's Apollo Moon program in 1972. This mission was planned to be launched last month. But the launch had to be postponed due to helium leakage.

Earlier the government used to send passengers

Before this mission, only highly trained and government astronauts had done spacewalks. Since its construction in 2000, Chinese astronauts have done about 270 spacewalks on the International Space Station and 16 spacewalks on Beijing's Tiangong Space Station. On the third day of the Polaris Dawn spacewalk mission, the spacecraft will reach an altitude of 700 km and will last for about 20 minutes. Let us tell you that the first American spacewalk was done in 1965 in the Gemini capsule.