Two astronauts completed the first commercial spacewalk and tested slimmed-down spacesuits designed by SpaceXin one of the boldest attempts yet to push the boundaries of privately funded spaceflight.
Billionaire Jared Isaacman, 41, who chartered the Polaris Dawn mission, launched the space capsule at 11.52am on Thursday.
“Back home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” the 41-year-old space enthusiast said as he stood on a ladder and looked at the Earth’s surface look.
Isaacman was followed by Sarah Gillis, a senior engineer at SpaceX who spent years working on missions from the ground up. Gillis (30) conducted motion tests to determine how the new SpaceX suit – a much less bulky equivalent of the Nasa equipment – works in the vacuum of space.
To prepare for the test, which was conducted at an altitude of 435 miles (700 km), the Crew Dragon capsule was fully pressurized, meaning that the entire crew – including the two who remained inside – were on their relied on space suits for oxygen and pressure.
Only well-funded government agencies have so far managed to carry out spacewalks, known as EVAs (extra-vehicular activities), and this is a notoriously difficult feat. Most were done from the International Space Station (ISS) and the Chinese Tiangong Space Station.
Private companies are gradually taking the lead in spaceflight as governments, especially the US government, try to spend tax revenue elsewhere. NASA did SpaceX contracted to land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moon this decade.
Nasa chief Bill Nelson said Thursday’s successful EVA represented “a giant leap forward for the commercial space industry and Nasa’s long-term goal of building a vibrant US space economy”.
The Polaris Dawn mission is the second Isaacman has funded. He refused to give the price, but the missions are estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 2021, the private pilot and now trained astronaut, who made millions from his electronic payment company Shift4, on the Inspiration4 missionthe first orbital spaceflight by an all-civilian crew. That mission included a cancer survivor as well as a data engineer who won his seat in a lottery.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has operated both missions and considers them important milestones in making access to space easier and cheaper.
Musk plans to take astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars. His company is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, called Starshipand conducted four test flights of the 120 meter high system. The next one appears in November.
Ian Whittaker, a space physics expert at Nottingham Trent University, said the success of the “first non-space agency astronaut spacewalk” was “extremely exciting for the private space industry as it is the first step on a longer road to space tourism “.
“The high cost will mean that only the ultra-rich can experience it for now, but putting this cost in the hands of businesses means that taxpayers’ money can be used for other purposes,” he said.
The spacewalk lasted about 30 minutes, and Isaacman and Gillis always stayed on the ladder. While walking is impossible in microgravity, Nasa defines a spacewalk as “any time an astronaut gets out of a vehicle while in space”.
The first person to “walk” in space, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, spent 12 minutes outside his spacecraft on March 18, 1965. His mission showed some of the risks involved in designing spacesuits: by the end of the spacewalk, Leonov’s suit blew up in the vacuum of space to the point where he could no longer fit back into the airlock. He had to manually release air to get inside.
Tim Peake, the last British astronaut to go into space, said on X that it would be very interesting to hear the crew’s full feedback on the new EVA suit mobility, something he said was “incredibly important but difficult to achieve – especially fingertip fidelity” is. . He added: “Elbow mobility looks good though.”
Peake, 52, announced he had been chosen to lead a planned first all-British crewed mission in space. The British space agency undertakes this in an agreement with Axiom, an American company that organizes visits to the ISS.
During their five-day mission, the Polaris Dawn’s crew will act as test subjects for future deep space travel by traveling through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt and then analyzing the effects of space radiation on their bodies. The mission also includes a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, Scott Poteet, 50, and another SpaceX engineer, Anna Menon, 38.
Polaris Dawn’s spacewalk occurred at the same time as a record 19 astronauts orbited Earth, after Russia’s Soyuz rocket carried two astronauts and an American astronaut to the ISS.
