It’s “rush hour” in Earth orbit at the moment. With three new humans arriving at the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday, September 11, plus the all-civilian Polaris Dawn mission, a total of 19 people are orbiting Earth right now – that’s a new world record.
A US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts – Don Pettit, Aleksey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner – have joined nine others currently onboard the ISS: Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, Alexander Grebenkin, Oleg Kononenko, Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Nikolai Chub, and the two astronauts enjoying an extended stay, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Elsewhere in orbit, there are three “taikonauts” – Ye Guangfu, Li Cong, and Li Guangsu – onboard the Chinese Tiangong Space Station.
There are also four civilians in orbit – Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon – who are taking part in SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission, and just carried out the first-ever private space walk.
With a total of 19 humans, it beats the previous record for the most amount of humans in Earth’s orbit at one time. That record was set last year in May 2023 when 17 people were in orbit, including astronaut Frank Rubio who was also on an unplanned extended stay.
Bear in mind that the current episode is not the record for the largest number of people in space (it all depends on somewhat fiddly definitions of “space”). Using the US definition of space at 80 kilometers (50 miles), that record was broken in May 2023 when a total of 20 people were in space.
This involved people on the ISS and the Tiangong space station, plus two private sub-orbital space ventures by Virgin and Axiom Space. Sub-orbital flights do not orbit the Earth. Instead, they follow a curved trajectory that reaches the edge of space and then fall back to Earth.
But back to September 2024, the current Polaris Dawn mission is particularly novel and exciting. Cruising in a Crew Dragon spacecraft, is the further from Earth a crewed vehicle has flown since the era of the Apollo program in the 1960s and early ’70s. Gillis and Menon also earn the record for the furthest a woman has ever flown from Earth.
On September 12, the Polaris Dawn mission made even more history by conducting the first spacewalk ever attempted by private citizens using SpaceX’s newly designed spacesuits.
