Polaris Dawn, the first private crewed spaceflight to involve a spacewalk, is launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Polaris Dawn was a private crewed spaceflight operated by SpaceX on behalf of Shift4 CEO Jared Isaacman, the first of three planned missions in the Polaris program. Launched September 10, 2024, as the 14th crewed orbital flight of a Crew Dragon spacecraft, Isaacman and his crew of three — Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon — flew in an elliptic orbit that took them 1,400 kilometers away from Earth, the farthest crewed non-lunar mission and the farthest any human has been without leaving low Earth orbit. This was also the farthest humans traveled between NASA's Apollo 17 lunar landing in 1972 and Artemis II lunar flyby in 2026. They passed through parts of the Van Allen radiation belt to study the health effects of space radiation and spaceflight on the human body. Later in the mission, the crew performed the first commercial spacewalk.