Two astronauts from a SpaceX capsule in Earth’s orbit carried out the world’s first private spacewalk on Thursday, tethered to the Crew Dragon spacecraft in the vacuum of space while two others watched from inside, hundreds of miles from Earth.
Billionaire Jared Isaacman (41), exited first. After he returned a few minutes later, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis (30), was scheduled to take her turn in space, all their manoeuvres streaming live on the company’s website.
“Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Mr Isaacman said after emerging from the spacecraft, the planet glittering in half shadow below him.
Before the spacewalk began, the capsule was completely depressurised, with the whole crew relying on their slim, SpaceX-developed spacesuits for oxygen, provided via an umbilical connection to Crew Dragon.
Second presidential debate unlikely as Harris deemed to have overshadowed Trump
Fabric of Europe’s political centre is stretched by immigration issue
Harris has Trump’s measure - but she still faces steep climb to election win
China and US to discuss military communication at Beijing security conference
The spacewalk was scheduled to last only about 30 minutes, but the procedures to prepare for it and to finish it safely last about two hours. It was meant to test the new spacesuit designs and procedures for the capsule, among other things.
Mr Isaacman, Ms Gillis, Scott Poteet (50), a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon (38), had been orbiting Earth aboard Crew Dragon since Tuesday’s pre-dawn launch from Florida of the Polaris Dawn mission. Ms Menon and Mr Poteet remained inside the spacecraft during the spacewalk.
It is the Elon Musk-led company’s latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial space flight.
Mr Isaacman, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.
He has declined to say how much he is paying, but the missions are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, based on Crew Dragon’s price of roughly $55 million a seat for other flights.
Throughout Wednesday, the craft circled Earth at least six times in an oval orbit as shallow as 190km and stretching out as far as 1,400km , the farthest in space that humans have travelled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.
The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft then began to lower its orbit into a peak 700-km position and adjust cabin pressure to ready for the spacewalk, formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA), the Polaris program said on social media on Wednesday.
“The crew also spent a few hours demonstrating the suit’s pressurised mobility, verifying positions and accessibility in microgravity along with preparing the cabin for the EVA,” it said.
Only government astronauts with several years of training have done spacewalks in the past.
There have been roughly 270 on the International Space Station (ISS) since it was set up in 2000, and 16 by Chinese astronauts on Beijing’s Tiangong space station.
The Polaris crew has spent 2½ years training with SpaceX mission simulations and “experiential learning” in challenging, uncomfortable environments, said Mr Poteet.
A record 19 astronauts are now in orbit, after Russia’s Soyuz MS-26 mission ferried two cosmonauts and a US astronaut to the International Space Station on Wednesday, taking its headcount to 12.
Three Chinese astronauts are aboard the Tiangong space station.
The first US spacewalk in 1965, aboard a Gemini capsule, used a similar procedure to the one planned for Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurised, the hatch opened, and a space-suited astronaut ventured outside on a tether.
Since 2001, Crew Dragon, the only US vehicle capable of reliably putting humans in orbit and returning them to Earth, has flown more than a dozen astronaut missions, mainly for Nasa.
The agency seeded development of the capsule under a programme meant to establish commercial, privately-built US vehicles capable of ferrying astronauts with the ISS.
Also developed under that programme was Boeing’s Starliner capsule, but it is farther behind.
Starliner launched its first astronauts to the ISS in June in a troubled test mission that ended this month with the capsule returning empty, leaving its crew on the space station for a Crew Dragon capsule to fetch next year. – Reuters
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis