Early on Thursday morning, SpaceX accomplished a historic first for a company: its first spacewalk.
Two members of the crew, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, successfully exited SpaceX’s Dragon capsule “Resilience” during the private Polaris Dawn mission’s grand finale. This is the first spacewalk carried out by private citizens as opposed to government astronauts.
Commander and mission donor Issacman remarked, “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” He declared this after exiting the spacecraft.
SpaceX views the spacewalk—also referred to as extravehicular activity, or EVA—as a critical step in achieving its mission of launching humans into space.
In collaboration with Isaacman, the millionaire inventor of Shift4 payments, SpaceX spent over two years creating space suits that can shield astronauts from the harsh atmosphere of space. Gillis, the mission specialist, and Anna Menon, the medical officer, are the first corporate employees to fly on a mission.
After the spacecraft’s hatch opened, the entire four-person crew was exposed to space vacuum for around two hours during the Polaris Dawn event. For around seven minutes each, Isaacman and Gillis were outside the capsule testing the spacesuits’ maneuverability.
Tuesday saw the mission’s launch by SpaceX. In addition to the spacewalk, Polaris Dawn is conducting approximately 40 science and research experiments, raising money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and reaching an orbit of more than 1,400 kilometers from Earth, the furthest humans have traveled in space since the Apollo program.
Isaacman, who led the Inspiration4 trip to orbit for the first time in 2021, stated that he is spearheading the Polaris Program to push the envelope of private spaceflight.
“This is the inspiration side of it … anything that’s different than what we’ve seen over the last 20 or 30 years is what gets people excited, thinking: ‘Well, if this is what I’m seeing today, I wonder what tomorrow’s going to look like or a year after,’” Isaacman stated before to the expedition.