An internet entrepreneur and a SpaceX engineer have become the first private astronauts to walk in space.
Jared Isaacman, who has amassed a fortune through his online payment company Shift4, paid for the mission, known as Polaris Dawn. Just before 7 a.m. ET, Isaacman pulled open the hatch and floated outside.
He spent about 10 minutes outside the SpaceX Dragon capsule looking down on Earth. A few minutes later, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis stepped outside for a similar amount of time.
The mission’s two other astronauts, Scott Poteet, a former Air Force pilot who works for Isaacman, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, remained inside the capsule to support the Isaacman and Gillis.
But because the capsule had no air inside, they too were technically spacewalking, making this the largest number of astronauts to ever spacewalk simultaneously, according to the company. The entire spacewalk was livestreamed by SpaceX.
Until now, walking in space was the sole purview of professional astronauts. Spacewalks are regularly conducted outside the International Space Station, for example, to perform essential maintenance and run experiments. Those spacewalks can last several hours and usually follow a grueling schedule that allows minimal time for enjoying the view.
In many ways, today’s spacewalk is a throwback to the earliest days of the space program. SpaceX’s new spacesuits look modern, but they don’t have self-contained life support. The astronauts receive oxygen through umbilicals, similar to the spacewalks of the Gemini missions in the 1960s.
Isaacman and Gillis didn't go far. They got about three-quarters of the way out of the hatch and held onto a special set of rails that SpaceX has dubbed the Skywalker. While outside, they conducted several tests of the SpaceX spacesuits to determine their mobility. The suits seemed to rate a middling "3" in most regards (it was unclear whether the rating scale was 1 to 5 or 1 to 10).
Still, the mission is a huge success for SpaceX. Spacewalks are one of the riskiest parts of space travel. Spacesuits are essentially tiny spacecraft. They must provide life support and temperature control to the astronauts, who are exposed to huge temperature swings in the vacuum of space. Problems on spacewalks are not uncommon, and they can be serious — in 2013, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned in space, after water from his suit’s cooling system leaked into his helmet.
SpaceX hopes its new suits can be used one day by astronauts traveling to the Moon and Mars.
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