by CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A tech billionaire conducted the first private spacewalk hundreds of miles above Earth on Thursday, a high-risk venture until now reserved for professional astronauts.
Technology entrepreneur Jared Isaacman has teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s brand-new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring spacewalk also saw SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis exit the building after Isaacman was safely back inside.
This spacewalk was simple and quick – less than two hours – compared to NASA’s lengthy endeavors. International Space Station astronauts often have to move around the sprawling complex for repairs, always in pairs and laden with equipment. Station spacewalks can last seven to eight hours.
Isaacman was the first to exit the hatch and joined a small elite group of astronauts that until then had only included professional astronauts from a dozen countries.
“We all have a lot of work to do back home. But from here, it really does look like a perfect world,” Isaacman said as the capsule hovered over the South Pacific. Onboard cameras captured his silhouette, waist-high at the hatch, with the blue Earth below.
The commercial spacewalk was the main focus of the five-day flight, funded by Isaacman and Elon Musk’s company, and represented the culmination of years of development aimed at colonizing Mars and other planets.
All four on board donned new spacesuits to protect themselves from the harsh vacuum. They launched from Florida on Tuesday, traveling farther from Earth than anyone since NASA’s moonwalks. The orbit was reduced by half – to 740 kilometers – for the spacewalk.
This first spacewalk test involved more stretching than walking. Isaacman kept a hand or foot attached to the suit the entire time while flexing his arms and legs to see how the new spacesuit held up. The hatch was designed with a walker-like structure for additional support.
After about 15 minutes outdoors, Isaacman was replaced by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, who performed the same movements. Gillis rocked up and down in zero gravity, no higher than her knees out of the capsule, while rotating her arms and sending reports to mission control.
Each had 12-foot-long tethers attached, but they did not uncoil or dangle at the ends, unlike on the space station, where astronauts routinely float out in a much lower orbit.
More and more wealthy passengers are shelling out huge sums for flights aboard private rockets to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. Others have spent tens of millions to spend days or even weeks in space. Space experts and risk analysts say it’s inevitable that some will seek the thrill of a spacewalk, considered one of the most dangerous but also most exciting parts of space travel after launch and reentry.
This operation was planned down to the minute and left little room for error. Trying out new spacesuits from a spacecraft that had never done spacewalks increased the risk even more. The same was true of the fact that the entire capsule was exposed to the vacuum of space.
There were a few glitches. Isaacman had to open the hatch manually rather than pushing a button on board. Before he set off, Gillis reported seeing bulges in the hatch seal.
Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon remained strapped into their seats to monitor the action from inside. All four completed intensive training before the trip.
Isaacman, 41, CEO and founder of credit card company Shift4, has declined to disclose how much he invested in the flight. It was the first of three flights in a program he dubbed Polaris; this one was called Polaris Dawn. He took competition winners and a cancer survivor with him for SpaceX’s first private flight of 2021.
As of Thursday, only 263 people from 12 countries had undertaken a spacewalk. The first was Alexei Leonov from the Soviet Union in 1965, followed a few months later by Ed White from NASA.
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