Earlier today, four private astronauts rocketed into orbit to conduct SpaceX’s most dangerous mission yet. After a few days orbiting Earth, the passengers will suit up and open their spacecraft’s hatch. All the precious, breathable air from their capsule will escape into the cold void. Two of them will venture out, holding onto an external ladder with gloved hands as they dangle above the planet. All four will face the vacuum of space, relying on their spacesuits, which SpaceX has never tested in space before, to stay alive. It will be the first civilian spacewalk in history — and perhaps the riskiest spacewalk in decades.
The mission, known as Polaris Dawn, is a throwback to the early days of American spaceflight. Before NASA developed airlock technology—the small compartment that separates the habitable environment inside a spacecraft from the inhospitable environment outside—the entire crew of American space capsules were exposed to the vacuum during spacewalks. SpaceX is now going back to the old style because a private citizen, billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, wants to take a spacewalk. Isaacman is funding the mission, so the company has an incentive to pursue his space dreams, however wild they may be. But SpaceX also has a history of moving fast and destroying things to meet its own ambitious goals and, because it has customers with a corresponding mindset, has pioneered private spaceflight. The company might look less like it’s repeating NASA’s greatest hits and more like it’s lapping the venerable space agency—as long as its passengers get back home.
Isaacman had already chartered a SpaceX mission in 2021, the first orbital mission without government astronauts. In 2022, he contracted SpaceX for three more missions, essentially launching his own private space program, guided by his lifelong interest in space exploration and a penchant for high-flying first flights: As a young pilot, Isaacman broke a speed record for circumnavigating the globe. Isaacman and the rest of the crew — two SpaceX employees and one of his longtime friends, a retired Air Force pilot — have trained extensively for the trip, including simulating emptying and refilling SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. But even among the best-prepared professional astronauts, there is “unimaginable anxiety among first-time spacewalkers, and that uncertainty affects the entire crew when there is no airlock,” Kenneth “Taco” Cockrell, a retired NASA shuttle astronaut, told me. Even if the astronauts keep a cool head, both time and breathable air are limited during a spacewalk, and serious malfunctions in their suits, ship or life support systems could be fatal.
Isaacman is aware of the potential dangers but seems largely unbothered by them. “It’s not without risk, and you take that risk because you want to move the ball forward, things that will help SpaceX open up that frontier for everybody,” Isaacman said in a recent interview with CBS News. Eventually, someone was going to do the first private spacewalk, so why not now and why not him?
In images from the first American spacewalk in 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White looks like the quintessential space cowboy, floating unsupported above the Earth, attached by a rope like a lasso to the Gemini capsule floating ahead of him. What the image doesn’t capture is how harrowing White’s experience was. White and the mission’s other astronaut, James McDivitt, struggled with nearly every aspect of the walk: opening the hatch, untangle the tangle of cables after White was back inside, close the hatch. Later, on Earth, White described the final 30-second struggle with the door as “probably the most dramatic moment of my life.” Both astronauts “were almost exhausted,” Carroll “Pete” Woodling, then NASA’s chief of crew safety and procedures, recalled in a 2000 interview. NASA would have lost both men had they failed to lock the door. A year later, Gene Cernan found it almost impossible to move as his spacesuit stiffened in the vacuum of space. In addition, early space capsules lacked hand and foot grips on the outside, making maneuvering extremely strenuous. When Cernan was finally back in the capsule, “he looked as red as a boiled lobster,” wrote space historian Michael Neufeld.
Polaris Dawn seems even more outrageous when you consider that Dragon wasn’t designed for spacewalking. Yes, it has transported many astronauts to and from the International Space Station in recent years, but those passengers always remained cozily locked inside the vehicle until it docked with the ISS. Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, and SpaceX engineers had to modify the capsule for this mission, including increasing its oxygen reserves so that all four suits would have enough air to last the entire two-hour event.
Isaacman says Polaris Dawn features some key improvements over old-fashioned spacewalks. He and fellow SpaceX astronaut trainer Sarah Gillis will keep their feet on the ladder. The Dragon spacecraft has a motorized system to help astronauts operate the hatch. And compared to what White and Cernan wore, the SpaceX suit is sci-fi garb, sleek and tight-fitting, with a helmet that shows the wearer the suit’s performance metrics. Hopefully, in the vacuum of space, it won’t turn into “a rusty suit of armor,” as Cernan described his own outfit. But Polaris Dawn is the first experiment of its kind, and these features don’t guarantee an easy spacewalk—nothing can.
Commercial spaceflight has always brought new risks with leaving Earth. If the Polaris attempt goes wrong, it will be another entry in the ever-growing list of wealthy individuals choosing the wrong extreme adventure. If it succeeds, SpaceX will be able to market spacewalks to anyone. And with the help of its most loyal customer, it will further cement its status as America’s leading space company. A successful demonstration of SpaceX’s spacesuits could even put the company in front of NASA. The spacesuits NASA uses on the International Space Station are more than 40 years old and regularly cause problems for astronauts. Just this summer, NASA aborted a spacewalk before the astronauts had even exited the ISS airlock when Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit developed a water leak. NASA is also struggling to develop suits for its future moonwalkers, who are scheduled to land on the lunar surface before the end of the decade—not to mention outfits that could help extend human presence even deeper into the solar system. If SpaceX’s designs are up to the challenge, the company will have the most coveted suits in the industry.
SpaceX’s influence on the American space agenda grows larger every year. SpaceX sets an example — and provides the technology — of what the country might be capable of this century. The same could soon be true for SpaceX’s customers. Isaacman has offered to use the mission to Polaris Dawn to raise the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope, which sinks a little closer to Earth each year to extend its life — an operation that would involve a spacewalk. NASA has not yet accepted Isaacman’s offer, but if it does, the agency will cede another unit of power to the commercial space sector and to a single rich American with delusions of grandeur.
In years to come, SpaceX customers might dream of using Dragon to clean up space junk, refuel a space telescope that’s run out of fuel, or simply float detached from a spacecraft because that’s what Bruce McCandless looked cool doing in 1988. SpaceX likes to portray itself as a mission-driven company whose employees have bought into its ultimate dream, but it’s still a company where customers can pay handsomely for the chance to risk their lives. What Isaacman is pulling off isn’t just a stunt, but it has some elements of it: the risk, the questionable rationale, the pursuit of personal glory. He’s ushering in a true cowboy era in spaceflight. Now the daring astronauts aren’t employees doing spacewalks for the glory of their country and planet, but customers who are putting themselves in harm’s way for reasons of their own — and still charting the course of our cosmic future.
