Height, depth and spaceWorld record
Highest altitude for a crewed non-lunar mission
1,408.10 km
874.953 mi
- Holder
- Polaris Dawn crew
- Year
- Standing since
- 2024 (2 years)
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What to remember
At 00:27 UTC on 11 September 2024, 15 hours and 4 minutes after liftoff, the Polaris Dawn crew fired the Draco thrusters of their Crew Dragon Resilience capsule. The burn lifted the apogee of their orbit to 1,408.10 km (874.95 miles), the greatest altitude reached by a crewed mission that was not headed for the Moon.
Four people were on board: Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. The figure is taken at apogee, the highest point of the capsule's path.
The words "non-lunar" matter. Spaceflight records are split between crewed and uncrewed flights, and the history of space travel reads as a chain of firsts: Sputnik 1 in 1957, Yuri Gagarin in orbit in 1961, Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969. Lunar missions form a category of their own; Polaris Dawn set the mark in the other one.
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Sources and licences
- Value, holder and date: Wikipedia article “List of spaceflight records” (revision used 1379337360). Data from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Photo: NASA, Photo licensed under Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).
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