Billionaire, SpaceX employee crewmate perform first commercial spacewalk
ORLANDO, Fla. — The four crew of Polaris Dawn can breathe easy again after having vented the entire atmosphere of their SpaceX Crew Dragon so its commander and billionaire Jared Isaacman along with crewmate and SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis could venture outside the spacecraft and perform the first commercial spacewalk on Thursday.
The duo performed the historic feat in less than two hours, each outside the spacecraft for less than 20 minutes.
Crewmates Scott Poteet and Anna Menon remained inside the Dragon, but all four had to wear SpaceX’s new extravehicular activity (EVA) suits because the spacecraft does not have an airlock, so they were all subjected to the vacuum of space.
Isaacman led the way opening the forward hatch of Dragon.
“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said amid cheers from SpaceX headquarters during the company’s live stream of the event.
He performed a series of maneuvers while never losing contact with a mobility structure called the “Skywalker” that stuck out from the end of the spacecraft.
Gillis followed performing the same maneuvers, all part of a test of how the new suits worked for SpaceX.
The hatch was closed tight and the cabin repressurized successfully, which allows the four to remove their EVA suits to continue the rest of their flight. The spacewalk began at 6:12 a.m. and ended just before 8 a.m. for a total of 1 hour and 46 minutes.
Polaris Dawn, which launched from Kennedy Space Center early Tuesday, is the first of up to three missions under what is called the Polaris Program led by Isaacman in partnership with SpaceX.
He made his fortune with credit-card-processing company Shift4 Payments, and first flew to space in 2021 on Inspiration4. The final mission of the Polaris Program will be the first human spaceflight of SpaceX’s in-development Starship and Super Heavy. Isaacman has declined to say how much of his own money he has spent on any of the private missions.
The spacewalk comes halfway through the five-day mission, which also saw the Crew Dragon fly to a 870 miles altitude, the farthest for any human spacecraft in a low-Earth orbit, and the highest altitude ever traveled by women. The Apollo moon missions traveled a farther distance from Earth, but no in an Earth orbit.
The point of the altitude test was to subject Dragon to the radiation within the Van Allen belts in the Earth’s magnetosphere.
The mission also has a laser-based communication technology demonstration using point-to-point Starlink hardware while the quartet also perform more than 30 science and research experiments on board.
They are slated to splash back down off the Florida coast in either the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic early Sunday.