One of the astronauts on the Polaris Dawn mission, billionaire Jared Isaacman, became the first person in history to conduct a private spacewalk when he successfully left the SpaceX Dragon capsule, located 700 kilometers from Earth, at 6:52 a.m. on the East Coast of the United States (1052 GMT).
After just over forty minutes of final preparations, the ship’s hatch opened and Commander Isaacman emerged, wearing one of the suits from Elon Musk’s company tested as part of this mission, during which, for the first time, an astronaut not belonging to a government space agency walked in space.
After 10 minutes, Isaacman returned to the ship and at 7:05 a.m. U.S. time (1105 GMT), another crew member, Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer, launched into space.
Both are required to work shifts of about 15 minutes for two hours, while the other two crew members, Anna Menon, lead operations engineer and flight surgeon, and pilot Scott Poteet, assist them from the ship. As they walk in space, Gillis and Isaacman are in constant contact with the ship thanks to handrails and rails added to the capsule for this purpose.
Before the doors opened, the mission’s four astronauts carefully checked their suits, which included enhancements to protect astronauts from radiation and the extreme thermal environment of space, to ensure there were no leaks.
Although only two of them are doing the walk, all four crew members are wearing pressurized suits equipped with cameras, as Dragon has no airlock and therefore the entire capsule was depressurized before opening the capsule door for the walk.
The longest manned voyage in the last 50 years
The Polaris Dawn mission, which took off from Cape Canaveral (Florida) on Tuesday, passed 1,400 kilometers from Earth on Wednesday, the furthest manned journey since the Apollo missions more than 50 years ago.
At that point, about 15 hours after Tuesday’s launch from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Menon and Gillis became the women who have traveled the furthest from Earth, surpassing the 385-mile mark set by NASA astronaut Kathryn Sullivan when she helped deploy the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.
Once positioned at this distance, the Dragon spacecraft completed its six planned orbits around the Earth’s surface. After the Dragon capsule fired its engines four times, it was placed in an orbit 457 miles (737 kilometers) from Earth, prior to the spacewalk.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions that billionaire Isaacman, founder of online payments company Shift4, bought from SpaceX in 2022 for his Polaris program, for an amount that has not been made public. In 2021, the businessman led the Inspiration4 mission, the first fully commercial mission to orbit planet Earth.
The mission entered the so-called Van Allen radiation belts, areas where energetic particles are trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field, where they will carry out dozens of scientific experiments.
