The Polaris Dawn mission took a decisive step into the future on Thursday morning when two private citizens, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, briefly stepped out of their Dragon spacecraft.

Although each of them spent only about eight minutes outside the capsule, the spacewalk was undoubtedly a huge success for SpaceX and the four astronauts in orbit. It was the first time a private company, SpaceX, had conducted a spacewalk. The Isaacman-funded mission kicked off a hectic two-year period of spacesuit development, testing and simulation by the California company that ultimately led to Thursday’s remarkably smooth operation.

Isaacman left Dragon at 6:52 a.m. ET (10:52 UTC) as the spacecraft passed the planet below near Australia. Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and avid pilot, paused for a moment as he stood on the edge of eternity and looked back at planet Earth.

“We all have a lot to do at home, but from here the Earth really looks like a perfect world,” he said.

How it developed

After nearly two weeks of weather-related delays, the Polaris Dawn mission launched early Tuesday morning aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. The crew, consisting of Isaacman, pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, reached an altitude of over 900 miles (1,400 km) on the first day of the mission before returning to a lower altitude in preparation for Thursday morning’s spacewalk.

Just a few hours after launch, the crew began a pre-breathing process to acclimate their bodies to lower pressure. At the start of cabin depressurization on Thursday morning, cabin pressure was 8.6 psi, which is slightly higher than at Mount Everest Base Camp. (Sea level pressure on Earth is 14.7 psi.) At that point, the four astronauts were breathing pure oxygen through their suits.

Depressurization of the Dragon spacecraft, which has no airlock, took about 30 minutes. When the Dragon spacecraft’s cabin was in vacuum, the pressure in the astronauts’ suits was about 5 psi, which is slightly less than the pressure at the top of Mount Everest. At that point, Isaacman manually opened the hatch and ascended into space.

Isaacman was connected to Dragon via an oxygen and temperature control line and carried out a series of tests on the suit’s mobility, testing hand and body movements and the ability to use tools. With just a minute left before he had to re-enter Dragon, Isaacman took one last look at his surroundings. Below him, the Earth disappeared into the darkness while Dragon hovered over New Zealand.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

After Isaacman climbed back inside the spacecraft, Gillis, a SpaceX engineer who worked on spacesuits, among other things, followed. She performed a similar series of tests. Like Isaacman, Gillis stretched most of her body outside Dragon, with only her lower legs still inside the spacecraft. At 30, she is the youngest person ever to walk in space.

At 7:58 a.m. ET, it was all over. The entire spacewalk, from depressurizing the cabin to Isaacman and Gillis’ operations to re-ventilating Dragon, had taken just 1 hour and 46 minutes.

“Today’s success represents a giant step forward for the commercial space industry and NASA’s long-term goal of building a vibrant U.S. space economy,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement after the spacewalk concluded.

What’s the big deal?

You might wonder what’s so special about that. After all, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk in 1965. He spent 12 minutes outside his spacecraft Vozhkod. Since then, 263 people from dozens of countries have made spacewalks. In 2001, NASA astronauts Susan Helms and James Voss made a spacewalk that lasted 8 hours and 56 minutes.

In a sense, Isaacman and Gillis were treading a well-trodden path that stretches back nearly sixty years.

And yet it is important. Quite important.

Something similar could be said about the first launch of the Falcon 9 rocket in 2010. Before that, countries and even some large private contractors funded by governments had built medium-range rockets. The Falcon 9, in its first version, was just another rocket flying into orbit. But here’s the difference. Fourteen years later, the privately developed Falcon 9 has revolutionized the launch vehicle industry by demonstrating its rapid reusability. It will launch more than 100 times this year, something no government or company has done before.

Now imagine where SpaceX and that spacesuit might be in 14 years. The first Falcon 9 rocket went through four major redesigns, more than doubling its payload capacity. The same goes for that spacesuit. It’s not too hard to imagine a world where dozens of people launch on Starship and take similar spacewalks in orbit. Future versions of those spacesuits will almost certainly walk on the moon and, one day, Mars.

That’s why it’s not being overdone. These cautious and short spacewalks may represent a crucial step in humanity’s expansion into the solar system. And it happened this morning.