Two astronauts have completed the first commercial spacewalk and tested stripped-down SpaceX spacesuits in one of the boldest attempts yet to push the boundaries of privately funded space travel.
Hundreds of miles above Earth and orbiting at nearly 30,000 km/h (18,600 mph), 41-year-old billionaire Jared Isaacman, who chartered the Polaris Dawn mission, exited the space capsule at 11:52 a.m. BST on Thursday.
“We all have a lot to do at home, but from here, the Earth really looks like a perfect world,” said the 41-year-old space enthusiast, standing on a ladder and looking down at the Earth’s surface.
Isaacman was followed by Sarah Gillis, a senior engineer at SpaceX who has worked on ground-based missions for years. Gillis, 30, conducted motion tests to assess how SpaceX’s new spacesuit – a much less bulky equivalent of NASA’s gear – performs in the vacuum of space.
In preparation for the test, which was conducted at an altitude of 700 km, the Crew Dragon capsule was completely depressurized, meaning the entire crew – including the two who remained inside – had to rely on their spacesuits for oxygen and pressure.
Until now, only well-funded government agencies have been able to conduct spacewalks, known as EVAs (Extravehicular Activities), and these are notoriously difficult undertakings. Most of these missions have been carried out from the International Space Station (ISS) and the Chinese Tiangong Space Station.
Private companies are gradually taking the lead in space travel as governments, particularly the U.S. government, seek to spend their tax revenues elsewhere. NASA has contracted SpaceX to land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moon this decade.
NASA chief Bill Nelson said Thursday’s successful EVA represented “a giant step forward for the commercial space industry and NASA’s long-term goal of building a vibrant U.S. space economy.”
The Polaris Dawn mission is the second one Isaacman has funded. He declined to disclose the price, but the missions are estimated to cost several hundred million dollars.
In 2021, the private pilot turned astronaut, who made millions with his electronic payments company Shift4, flew on the Inspiration4 mission, the first space flight by an all-civilian crew. The mission included a cancer survivor and a data engineer who won his place in a lottery.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has carried out both missions and sees them as important milestones in making access to space easier and cheaper.
Musk plans to take astronauts to the moon and eventually to Mars. His company is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever, called Starship, and has conducted four test flights of the 120-meter-tall system. The next one is scheduled for November.
Ian Whittaker, a space physics expert at Nottingham Trent University, said the success of the “first spacewalk by an astronaut not conducted by a space agency” was “extremely exciting for the private space industry as it is the first step on a longer path to space tourism”.
“The high costs will mean that only the super-rich will benefit for the time being. However, if these costs are borne by companies, the taxpayers’ money can be used for other purposes,” he said.
The spacewalk lasted about 30 minutes, and Isaacman and Gillis remained on the ladder the entire time. While walking is impossible in microgravity, NASA defines a spacewalk as “any moment an astronaut steps out of a vehicle in space.”
The first person to “walk” in space, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, spent 12 minutes outside his spacecraft on March 18, 1965. His mission demonstrated some of the risks associated with spacesuit design: by the end of the spacewalk, Leonov’s suit had inflated so much in the vacuum of space that it no longer fit into the airlock. He had to manually deflate it to get inside.
Tim Peake, the last British astronaut in space, said on X it would be very interesting to hear full crew feedback on the mobility of the new EVA suit. He said something was “incredibly important but difficult to achieve – in particular fingertip accuracy”. He added: “Elbow mobility looks great though.”
Peake, 52, has announced that he has been chosen to lead the planned first all-British manned space mission, which the UK space agency is running under a contract with Axiom, an American company that organises visits to the ISS.
During their five-day mission, the Polaris Dawn crew will act as test subjects for future trips into space by traversing parts of the Van Allen radiation belt and then analyzing the effects of space radiation on their bodies. The mission also includes a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, Scott Poteet (50), and another SpaceX engineer, Anna Menon (38).
Polaris Dawn’s spacewalk coincided with the launch of 19 astronauts into Earth’s orbit, a new record after a Russian Soyuz rocket carried two cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut to the ISS.
