by Billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX crew trainer Sarah Gillis plan to open the front hatch of their Polaris Dawn Spacecraft will take turns floating outdoors early Thursday morning to complete the first non-governmental spacewalk in the history of space exploration.
While crewmates Anna Menon and Scott Poteet monitor the safety tethers and utility lines inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, Isaacman and Gillis plan to float out into open space after the spacecraft depressurizes at about 2:23 a.m. EDT, using a scaffold-like “Skywalker” structure that protrudes from the hatch for stabilization.
Although their feet are just outside the hatch, they will not “free float” away from the Crew Dragon. Their pressure suits, developed by SpaceX, are not equipped with their own oxygen supply or other life support equipment and rely on the 12-foot-long umbilicals to provide air, power and communications.
As Isaacman and then Gillis hover just outside the hatch, they will test the comfort and mobility of their pressurized extravehicular activity (EVA) suits by moving their arms, hands and legs through a series of positions to find out how much effort is required to perform basic tasks.
“We’ll be using various mobility aids that the SpaceX team has developed, and it will look like we’re doing a little bit of dancing,” Isaacman said before the launch. “The idea is to learn as much as we can about this suit and give it back to the engineers to drive future suit design developments.”
Cameras mounted inside and outside the Crew Dragon, as well as others on the astronauts’ suits, are expected to provide spectacular views of space and the Earth below as the space shuttle moves through an elliptical orbit with a low point at 195 kilometers and a high point at 737 kilometers – 320 kilometers higher than the International Space Station.
The goal of the exercise is to develop low-cost and easy-to-manufacture spacesuits for future commercial astronauts flying to the Moon or Mars aboard SpaceX’s Super Heavy Starship rockets.
“I think this path of developing affordable EVA suits that can be mass produced is very worthwhile,” said Isaacman, who chartered SpaceX’s first fully commercial flight into orbit in 2021. “At some point in the future, an armada of spacecraft will arrive on Mars, and the people there need to be able to get out, walk around, and do important things.”
Isaacman, Poteet, Menon and Gillis launched Tuesday from Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew accomplished the flight’s first major objective on the first try, climbing to an altitude of 870 miles — higher than any manned spacecraft since the Apollo moon program 60 years ago.
The highest point, or apogee, of the orbit was then lowered to 737 kilometers for the spacewalk and the remainder of the five-day mission.
To prevent decompression sickness (also called diver’s sickness) during the crew’s transition from sea level pressure to the reduced pressure of 5 psi in their spacesuits and back, flight controllers initiated a 45-hour process shortly after launch to increase the oxygen level in the cabin while slowly lowering the air pressure to remove nitrogen from the crew’s bloodstream.
“We don’t expect to experience decompression sickness because a lot of thorough preparation went into developing this pre-breath protocol, which significantly reduces the risk,” said Menon, a former NASA biomedical flight controller. “But we are prepared if we need it.”
The Crew Dragon does not have an airlock and its life support system is not designed for spacewalks. Required modifications included “adding a lot more oxygen to the spacecraft so that we can supply oxygen to four suits via umbilicals for the entire duration of the spacewalk,” Gillis said.
“There were upgrades and enhancements to the spacecraft’s environmental sensing to make sure we have really good visibility, both before, during and after the vacuum exposure. And … a completely new system, a nitrogen suppression system” to return the cabin to normal pressure after the spacewalk.
Along with the Skywalker frame that extends just beyond the forward hatch, a motor drive system was added to make opening and closing the hatch easier, and improved seals were installed to ensure an airtight seal.
NASA astronaut Ed White made the first U.S. spacewalk on June 3, 1965, floating from his Gemini 4 capsule at the end of a long tether. Since then, NASA astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, Chinese taikonauts and astronauts from space station partner nations have conducted more than 470 government-sponsored spacewalks.
Isaacman said iconic photos of White floating outside his Gemini capsule against the backdrop of Earth and space were inspiring, but he and Gillis ruled out the possibility of him floating freely from the Crew Dragon. And that’s intentional.
“We’re not going to do the Ed White float,” Isaacman told CBS News before the launch. “That might look cool, but it doesn’t really help SpaceX learn much about (the spacesuit’s) performance. It’s not very useful or helpful in figuring out how to operate in a suit.”
To that end, he and Gillis will work through a “matrix” of planned movements to get a feel for how the suit’s various joints move under pressure. They also plan to test the performance of an innovative head-up display in the helmet and better understand how the air-cooled suits will cope with the extreme temperatures of space and a range of other factors.
The suit “includes all sorts of technologies, including a head-up display, a helmet camera and a completely new architecture for joint mobility,” Gillis said. “The suit is thermally insulated throughout, including a copper and indium tin oxide visor that provides both thermal and sun protection.”
In addition, she said, “there’s a lot of redundancy, both in the oxygen supply to the suit and all the valves and all the seals in the suit. It’s an incredible suit.”
The head-up display, which projects important data onto the lower left side of the helmet visor, is a feature that NASA’s decades-old space station suits do not have.
“During the EVA, we have visibility into our suit, pressure, temperature, relative humidity, and also how much oxygen we used during the EVA. So that’s some important telemetry data. And it’s really cool that you can still see that in any lighting.”
The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three missions Isaacman is planning in collaboration with Musk. The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission, while the third will be the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s giant Super Heavy Starship rocket, currently under development in Texas.
It is not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX itself has funded. When asked if he could share details, the entrepreneur, jet pilot and adventurer said: “Absolutely not.”
The mission, SpaceX’s fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and its 14th including NASA flights, is expected to last five days and end with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.
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