CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – A daring billionaire shot back into orbit Tuesday, with the goal of conducting the first private spacewalk and going farther than anyone since NASA’s Apollo moon missions.
Unlike his previous charter flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman the costs shared with SpaceX This time, it also included developing and testing brand new spacesuits to see how they would withstand the harsh vacuum.
If all goes to plan, it will be the first time that private citizens have performed a spacewalk. They will not, however, move away from the capsule. Spacewalks are considered one of the riskiest parts of space travel and have been the sole preserve of professional astronauts since 1965, when the former Soviet Union opened the hatch. Closely followed by the United States, they are now routine on the International Space Station.
Isaacman, along with two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn from Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, halfway through the five-day flight.
But first, the passengers want to fly far beyond the International Space Station – to an altitude of 1,400 kilometers. This would beat the record for orbiting the Earth set in 1966 during NASA’s Gemini project. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured further.
The plan is to spend 10 hours at that altitude — fraught with extreme radiation and debris — before reducing the oval orbit by half. Even at this lower altitude of 700 kilometers, the orbit would outperform the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest shuttle astronauts have ever reached.
All four wore SpaceX spacewalk suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to the dangerous environment.
Isaacman and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis will take turns jumping out of the hatch. They will test their black-and-white-trimmed suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot touching the capsule or the attached support structure, which resembles the top of a pool ladder. They will not dangle from the end of their 12-foot tethers, nor will they show off their jetpacks. Only NASA’s suits on the space station are equipped with jetpacks, and these are for emergency use only.
Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX’s Anna Menon will oversee the spacewalk from inside. Like SpaceX’s previous astronaut flights, this one will end with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.
“We send you hugs from the ground,” radioed launch manager Frank Messina after the crew reached orbit. “May you make history and come home safely.”
Isaacman replied, “Without the 14,000 of you at SpaceX and everyone else cheering us on, we wouldn’t be making this journey.”
At a press conference before the flight, Isaacman – CEO and founder of credit card company Shift4 – would not say how much he had invested in the flight. “Absolutely not,” he said.
SpaceX partnered with Isaacman to fund the spacesuit’s development and related costs, said William Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president who previously led NASA’s space mission operations.
“We are really starting to push new boundaries together with the private sector,” said Gerstenmaier.
It is the first of three trips Isaacman bought from Elon Musk 2 1/2 years ago, shortly after he returned from his first private SpaceX spaceflight in 2021. Isaacman funded this tourist trip with an undisclosed sum and took contest winners and a childhood cancer survivor along. The trip raised hundreds of millions for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Development of the spacesuit took longer than expected, delaying this first flight, known as Polaris Dawn, until now. The training was extensive; Poteet said it was comparable to anything he experienced during his flying career in the Air Force.
As SpaceX astronaut trainers, Gillis and Menon helped Isaacman and his former team, as well as NASA’s professional crews, prepare for their flights.
“I wasn’t alive when people walked on the moon. I want my children to see people walk on the moon and Mars and explore our solar system,” Isaacman, 41, said before the launch.
Bad weather caused a two-week delay. The crew needed favorable weather forecasts not only for launch but also for splashdown a few days later. With limited supplies and no way to reach the space station, they had no choice but to wait for better conditions.
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