It was more of a climb than a small step, but early Thursday morning, billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman took a giant step in spaceflight history when he ejected partway out of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule about 460 miles above Earth.
That’s because Isaacman is a private citizen, traveling on his own expense account aboard a private spacecraft, not a government astronaut paid for by taxpayer dollars, as previous astronauts have been. Isaacman’s five-day spaceflight, conceived in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and launched on Tuesday aboard the company’s Falcon 9 rocket, Polaris Dawn The mission is the first of three planned to advance the state of the art in human spaceflight. The mission will also raise funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Polaris Dawn Just hours after launch, the Dragon spacecraft had achieved its first historic milestone: It had fired its thrusters to raise its elliptical orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of more than 900 miles (1,400 kilometers). That was the furthest humans had traveled from Earth since the final Apollo lunar missions in the 1970s, which sent the entire planet flying to the Moon. And on Wednesday, after six orbits at that dizzying altitude (exposing the crew to high levels of space radiation and increasing the risk of encountering dangerous space debris), the Dragon spacecraft fired its thrusters again to propel itself to a lower, safer orbit where it would conduct its spacewalk.
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The meticulously orchestrated spacewalk, which was broadcast live from orbit to more than 2.5 million viewers on Earth, officially began at 6:12 a.m. EDT, about 163 miles (265 kilometers) above the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Ireland. Polaris Dawn The crew sealed their spacesuits and began breathing pure oxygen. It took about 20 minutes to complete leak checks on the suits and other final safety procedures, and they began deflation of the Dragon capsule at 6:30 a.m. By this time, Dragon was circling the vast expanse of the southern Indian Ocean at an orbital speed of more than 25,000 kilometers per hour.
As the crew spoke on an open microphone, a chorus of voices confirming their presence rose above the whoosh of air currents in the final moments as the fateful command was radioed from the ground: “SpaceX, log on. Dragon, open hatch.”
A few minutes later, at 6:51 a.m., Isaacman climbed onto a specially designed limbed platform called the Skywalker and peered out at the swirling planet below him: a vast ocean of rolling clouds and sunlit skies stretching between Australia and Antarctica, the Dragon’s high speeds carrying the craft rapidly into the orbital night, painting a great border of shadow stretching across the globe.
“We all have so much work to do back home,” Isaacman said, standing at the edge of space, staring into the boundary between darkness and light, “but from up here, Earth sure does look like a perfect world.”
Touching the void
The primary purpose of the spacewalk, which took place on the mission’s third orbital day, was to unveil and test the latest extravehicular activity (EVA) suit designed and built by SpaceX. The black-and-white suit is an evolution from the less protective suits the company previously wore for astronauts living and working inside spacecraft and the space station. The new version includes enhancements such as flexible joints for greater mobility, temperature control for increased astronaut comfort, and a helmet with a digital head-up display. Besides its use in EVAs for spacecraft maintenance and on-orbit servicing, the suit could support astronauts on future trips to the moon and could also help realize SpaceX founder Musk’s vision of developing a sustainable human settlement on Mars.
“The ultimate goal is that you can put on a spacesuit and go anywhere in the solar system and work and not feel like you’re wearing anything other than regular clothing,” Chris Trigg, SpaceX’s senior spacesuit manager, said in a video introducing the suit on X (formerly Twitter).
Crew of Polaris DawnLeft to right: Anna Menon, Sara Gillis, Scott Poteet, Isaacman.
Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Because Dragon does not have an airlock, the spacewalk required exposing the crew’s entire cabin to the airless vacuum of space. Polaris Dawn The two-hour spacewalk required the entire crew, including Isaacman, former U.S. Air Force pilot Scott Poteet, and two SpaceX engineers, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, to wear space suits. It also required an extensive “pre-breathing protocol,” which began immediately after liftoff. The procedure involved gradually reducing the air pressure in the crew compartment and increasing the oxygen content of the air. This reduced the crew’s blood nitrogen levels and minimized the chance of them contracting decompression sickness, a potentially fatal condition also known as “The Bends.”
The mission plan was for only Isaacman and Gillis to leave the Dragon spacecraft, taking turns every 10 minutes to peer out at the starry sky and the swirling world far below. Menon and Poteat stayed behind the craft the whole time, monitoring its health and navigating the 11-foot life-support cables that provided the pair with oxygen, power, and other necessities during the spacewalk.
“You only have a limited amount of time you can spend outside, and you only have a limited amount of material you can consume,” said U.S. Space Force Colonel and former NASA spacewalk astronaut Michael Hopkins, who joined two other commentators on SpaceX’s livestream of Isaacman’s historic feat. “It’s nice to get outside every once in a while, take a moment, look around, enjoy the view and reflect on where you actually are.”
The moment was fleeting. Minutes flew by as Isaacman stood over Skywalker, going through a series of motions, testing the suit’s mobility and flexibility in space. At one point, firmly anchored to the footing, he removed his hands from Skywalker as if preparing to fly away. But by 7 a.m. EDT, his time was up, and he was back inside the craft.
In this screenshot from the livestream, SpaceX engineer Gillis is standing halfway outside. Polaris DawnThe Dragon spacecraft during a spacewalk on the night side of Earth.
Now it was Gillis’ turn. As she rose to exit the craft, she inspected the Dragon’s hatch’s vital seals that keep air in and sustain life, noticing three small bulges on their edges. By 7:05 AM, she was aboard Skywalker. As the craft passed through nighttime terrain, she gave a mobility demonstration of the suit, a sunlit figure against a dark background. Back in the safety of the capsule, she manually adjusted the bulges on the seals, then returned them to their original positions. Just after 7:15 AM, she closed the hatch, and the Dragon began to repressurize.
Fifteen minutes later, pressure inside the capsule returned to normal and it approached the Southern California coast, poised for a poetic pass over SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
Spacewalk success
The views from up there would have been epic. Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Though the entire crew had endured rigorous training and endless simulations, only Isaacman had been in space before. Inspiration 4 The mission is scheduled to take place in 2021 in collaboration with SpaceX, but the new spacewalk suit has not yet been demonstrated in orbit.
“We’re going to do it as safely as possible,” Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of manufacturing and flight reliability and former head of NASA’s human spaceflight program, said at a press conference last month. “We have put in place the proper procedures and we’ve done the proper testing in preparation for departure.”
But even the best-laid plans can go awry. Of the more than 475 spacewalks ever conducted, roughly one in five has encountered problems, many of which could easily become life-threatening, says Jonathan Clark, a physician at Baylor College of Medicine who has served as a flight surgeon and spacesuit consultant for NASA. The first spacewalk, by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov in 1965, was aborted when Leonov’s suit inflated like a balloon and prevented him from returning to the spacecraft. NASA astronaut Ed White had an easier time on America’s first spacewalk in the 1960s. Gemini 4 mission in 1965. However, a follow-up in 1966 by NASA’s Eugene Cernan Gemini 9 As astronauts struggled to operate an experimental rocket thruster, they became so fatigued that their helmets fogged up, leading to an early end to a spaceflight. Moisture has also posed a deadly risk in recent times: During a spacewalk outside the International Space Station in 2013, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned when water leaked from his spacesuit’s cooling system and pooled in his helmet.
for Polaris DawnFor the spacewalkers, the only visible problem during the livestream was a bulging hatch seal. By 7:53 a.m., the cabin was fully repressurized. Five minutes later, as the crew refastened their seatbelts and the smell of fresh space powder wafted through the cabin, the spacewalk was officially declared over. The crew, as well as mission controllers on the ground, could breathe easy again.
Their most tense moment seems to be over, Polaris Dawn The astronauts have plenty more planned for the end of the mission. On Friday, the fourth day of the mission in space, the crew will test SpaceX’s Starlink satellites and a laser-based communications system for other spacecraft. The results will be added to a trove of findings from 36 other science experiments conducted aboard the spacecraft, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of the astronauts’ brains and X-ray images produced by natural space radiation coursing through the astronauts’ bodies.
From there, the crew will spend the rest of the day preparing for homecoming. On the morning of the sixth day, the crew will resuit their spacesuits and Dragon will perform a de-orbit burn, plummeting through Earth’s atmosphere and splashing down off the coast of Florida, where the astronauts and their spacecraft will be picked up by a waiting recovery ship.
Editor’s note (9/12/24): This article was edited after posting to correct the exact wording of Ed White’s 1965 spacewalk, Eugene Cernan’s first name, and statements made during the Polaris Dawn mission.
