by By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A group of private astronauts will make the first private spacewalk into orbit from a SpaceX capsule on Thursday, testing a new line of spacesuits.
A billionaire, a retired military pilot and two SpaceX employees have been orbiting Earth aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon since the spacecraft launched at dawn Tuesday from Florida on the Polaris Dawn mission, the company’s latest and riskiest attempt to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight.
The spacewalk is scheduled to begin at 2:23 a.m. ET (06:23 GMT), while the crew is at an altitude of 700 km. Two astronauts will exit Crew Dragon while the other two will remain inside. The capsule will be completely depressurized and the entire crew will rely on their stripped-down spacesuits developed by SpaceX for their oxygen supply.
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is funding the Polaris mission, as he did for his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. He has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they will likely cost hundreds of millions of dollars, considering Crew Dragon’s seat price on other flights is about $55 million.
Others in Polaris include mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers at the company.
Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft via an oxygen line, while Poteet and Menon will remain in the cabin.
So far, only government astronauts with several years of training have undertaken spacewalks. Since the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2000, there have been about 270 of them, and 16 Chinese astronauts on the Beijing Tiangong space station.
The first US spacewalk took place in 1965 aboard a Gemini capsule. A similar procedure was used to that planned for Polaris Dawn: the pressure in the capsule was released, the hatch opened and an astronaut in a spacesuit ventured out on a tether.
During the mission, the private Polaris astronauts will be at the center of a series of scientific investigations into the human body’s response to space, complementing decades of astronaut health studies facilitated by government astronauts on the ISS.
Crew Dragon, the only U.S. vehicle capable of reliably launching humans into orbit and returning them to Earth, has flown more than a dozen astronaut missions since 2021, mostly for NASA. The agency initiated development of the capsule as part of a program to develop commercial, privately built U.S. vehicles capable of transporting U.S. astronauts to the ISS and back.
Boeing’s Starliner capsule was also developed under this NASA program, but is still lagging somewhat behind. Starliner sent its first astronauts to the ISS in June. The test mission was problematic and ended this month with the capsule returning empty. The crew had to stay on the space station to be picked up by a Crew Dragon capsule next year.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Jamie Freed)
