Billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis made history on Thursday (September 12) by successfully completing the world’s first commercial spacewalk.
The duo took turns leaving the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The 41-year-old billionaire Isaacman exited the hatch at 6:52 AM Eastern Time (10:52 Greenwich Mean Time), followed by Gillis who left 10 minutes later. The entire operation was livestreamed on the company’s website.
“From home, we have a lot of work to do, but looking at it from here, Earth really looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said after stepping out of the space capsule. He exited from the nose of the spacecraft, overlooking the shimmering Earth below.
While outside the Crew Dragon, they conducted a series of maneuvers to test the flexibility of the spacesuits. This spacewalk, part of the ongoing Polaris Dawn Earth orbit mission, aimed to test the performance of SpaceX’s new spacesuit design in vacuum conditions as well as spacecraft procedures.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon launched on Tuesday morning and made history by sending four crew members, led by Isaacman, to a maximum altitude of 1,400 kilometers (870 miles). This marks the farthest distance humans have ventured into space since the last Apollo mission in 1972, with the goal of making future human exploration of the Moon and Mars possible.
Before the spacewalk, the spacecraft descended to an altitude between 195 and 737 kilometers (121-458 miles).
During the spacewalk, the other two crew members — Isaacman’s close friend, 50-year-old former U.S. Air Force pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, and SpaceX’s chief engineer, 38-year-old Anna Menon — stayed inside the Crew Dragon. All four crew members relied on SpaceX’s thin spacesuits for oxygen, supplied through an “umbilical cord” oxygen line connected to the spacecraft.
Prior to the mission, the spacecraft was fully depressurized. During the spacewalk, the hatch of the spacecraft remained open, exposing the entire interior to the vacuum of space.
Traditionally, spacewalks have been exclusive to government-employed astronauts trained by government agencies or nations, but Isaacman and the others are private astronauts. Isaacman provided funding for the mission but declined to disclose how much he contributed.
According to Reuters, based on previous estimates, the price for each seat on the Crew Dragon is approximately $55 million, making the cost of this mission potentially in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is the latest and most risky commercial space flight challenge by SpaceX, led by Elon Musk.
Since 2001, the Dragon spacecraft has been the only reliable U.S. vehicle to transport humans to orbit and return to Earth, having completed over ten crew missions primarily for NASA.
The first U.S. spacewalk in 1965 occurred aboard the Gemini spacecraft, using a procedure similar to the Polaris Dawn project: spacecraft depressurization, hatch opening, and astronauts in spacesuits exiting via tethers.
Since the establishment of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2000, there have been approximately 270 spacewalks conducted.