KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — Billionaire Jared Isaacman hasn’t been to space in 1,066 days. He has to wait at least seven more for his return, but this time he hopes to perform the first commercial spacewalk in history.

The man who spearheaded the first all-commercial crew on the Inspiraiton4 mission in September 2021 was back at Kennedy Space Center on Monday with three new crewmates for the private Polaris Dawn mission, a five-day orbital trip. It’s the first of three flights Isaacman plans with SpaceX as part of the Polaris Program he announced in 2022.

How the costs are being shared between Polaris and SpaceX has not been disclosed.

The four crew members will climb aboard the same spacecraft that took Isaacman to obit the first time, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience, and launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A in just under a week. They’re targeting a 3:38 a.m. liftoff during a 3:33-7:15 a.m. launch window on Monday, Aug. 26.

Isaacman, who made his fortune as the founder and CEO of credit-card-processing company Shift4 payments, again takes the commander role for the mission. In the pilot seat is friend Scott Poteet, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and demonstration pilot who flew with the Air Force Thunderbirds. The two mission specialists on the flight are both SpaceX employees: Sarah Gillis, who will join Isaacman on the spacewalk, and medical officer Anna Menon.

The quartet arrived with flair as five jets from Isaacman’s Polaris Ghost Squadron aerobatic team flew over the former shuttle landing facility at KSC a couple of times Monday, including performing a Delta burst maneuver above the runway before landing.

“We’re the four lucky ones that get to go on this ride,” Isaacman said. “But I can’t tell you how many teams have been working nonstop the last 2 1/2 years. … supporting that kind of bigger dreams that you know, maybe not in the not too distant future, humans are going to finally reach another planet.”

“The idea is to develop, test new technology and operations in furtherance of SpaceX’s bold vision to enable humankind to journey among the stars,” he said. That includes Elon Musk’s vision to eventually build a colony on Mars.

The program touts up to three flights with the final one tasked to be the first human spaceflight of SpaceX’s in-development Starship and Super Heavy.

Bill Gerstenmaier, a longtime NASA human spaceflight official and now SpaceX vice president of build and flight reliability, joined the Polaris Dawn crew for Monday’s press conference discussing the company’s push for innovation, which includes developing extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits in under three years.

“This pace of development that we get to do at SpaceX is very much like the pace of development that was required back in the early Apollo days,” he said. “We’re getting a chance to do that again, where we’re really starting to push frontiers with the private sector and learning new things that we would not be able to learn by staying in the risk-free environment of here on Earth.”

Next week’s mission also will send the Crew Dragon to an altitude much higher than previous flights — flying up to 870 miles above Earth on an elliptical orbit. The record for orbital altitude for a crewed mission was set in 1966, when NASA astronauts Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon flew on the Gemini 11 to 853 miles.

The spacecraft will then descend back to about 430 miles altitude where the one-hour spacewalk will happen. Isaacman’s and Gillis’ suits will be connected to the spacecraft with 12-foot-long tethers as each takes turns outside in the vacuum of space. Poteet and Menon, though, will also have to be in the EVA spacesuits as Crew Dragon has no airlock, so its entire cabin will have no atmosphere..

The EVA suits have helmets with visors that include digital heads-up displays, allowing the wearer to know the suit’s pressure, temperature and relative humidity.

The final main objective of the mission is to test laser-based communication using Starlink satellites, but the five days will also be filled with about 40 science experiments.

“It’s time to go out. It’s time to explore,” Gerstenmaier said “It’s time to do these big things and move forward.”