SpaceX achieves milestone with first Spacewalks by private citizens

• The crew’s Dragon spacecraft reached an orbit reaching 430 miles.
• This achievement marks another major milestone for SpaceX, which has reshaped the space industry.
• The mission followed a daring first phase, reaching a peak altitude of 1,400 kilometers.

On Thursday, a pioneering private crew made history as the first civilians to perform spacewalks, marking a major advancement for the commercial space industry.

The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission, led by fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman, launched early Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The mission journeyed deeper into the cosmos than any humans have in the past 50 years, since the Apollo program.

With the four-member crew’s Dragon spacecraft lowered to an orbit reaching 430 miles, pure oxygen began flowing into their suits, marking the official start of their extravehicular activity (EVA) at 1012 GMT on Thursday.

Shortly afterward, Isaacman unlatched the hatch and climbed through, gripping a structure known as “Skywalker,” which featured hand and footholds, as a breathtaking view of Earth unfolded below him.

“It’s gorgeous,” he told mission control in Hawthorne, California, where teams cheered on significant milestones.

This achievement marks another major milestone for SpaceX, the company Elon Musk founded in 2002. Initially dismissed by traditionalists, SpaceX has since become a powerhouse that has reshaped the space industry.

In 2020, SpaceX surpassed aerospace giant Boeing by delivering a safe crewed spaceship to transport NASA astronauts to the International Space Station.

Today, SpaceX launches more rockets than any competitor and provides Internet service to dozens of countries through its Starlink satellite constellation.

Before opening the hatch, the crew completed a “prebreathe” process to purge nitrogen from their blood, which prevents decompression sickness caused by nitrogen bubbles. They gradually reduced the cabin pressure to match the conditions of space.

Isaacman and crewmate Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer, spent a few minutes each peering into open space and conducting mobility tests on SpaceX’s next-generation suits. These suits feature heads-up displays, helmet cameras, and enhanced joint mobility systems before they return inside.

However, they did not float away on a tether like early spacefarers such as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov or NASA’s Ed White did in 1965. Nor did they use jetpacks to fly untethered as Space Shuttle astronauts did on three missions in 1984.

Since Dragon lacks an airlock, the entire crew was exposed to the vacuum of space. Mission pilot Scott Poteet and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon stayed strapped in throughout the activity, monitoring vital support systems.

“The risk is greater than zero, that’s for sure, and it’s certainly higher than anything that has been accomplished on a commercial basis,” former NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe told the news.

“This is another watershed event in the march toward commercialization of space for transportation,” he added, comparing the crewmates to early aviators who paved the way for modern air travel.

The spacewalk followed a daring first phase of the mission, during which the Dragon spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 1,400 kilometers. This altitude placed the crew more than three times higher than the International Space Station, in the inner Van Allen radiation belt—a region filled with dangerous, high-energy particles.

All four crew members underwent more than two years of training in preparation for the landmark mission, logging hundreds of hours on simulators, skydiving, centrifuge training, scuba diving, and summiting an Ecuadorian volcano.

Upcoming tasks include testing laser-based satellite communications between the spacecraft and the extensive Starlink satellite constellation and conducting dozens of experiments, including tests on contact lenses with embedded microelectronics to monitor changes in eye pressure and shape in space.

Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions in the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX. While the financial terms of the partnership remain undisclosed, Isaacman, the 41-year-old founder and CEO of Shift4Payments, reportedly invested $200 million of his fortune to lead the 2021 all-civilian SpaceX Inspiration4 orbital mission.

The final Polaris mission aims to be the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship, a prototype next-generation rocket central to founder Musk’s ambitions of colonizing Mars.

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