SpaceX milestone: Isaacman and Gillis conduct first-ever civilian spacewalk with Polaris Dawn

“SpaceX“We all have a lot of work to do at home, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Jared Isaacman said Thursday as he stepped out of the Dragon spacecraft and saw the blue circumference of Earth 430 miles away. While his statement lacks the impact of Neil Armstrong’s famous phrase “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” the 41-year-old entrepreneur and commander of the Polaris Dawn mission became the first person to conduct a private spacewalk.

She was followed by Sarah Gillis, a space operations engineer at SpaceX, the company behind this historic mission. Both crew members ventured out of the ship wearing EVAs, state-of-the-art space suits whose testing is one of the objectives of this operation.

The Polaris Dawn mission took off Last Tuesday, September 10, from the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a Falcon 9 rocket in an operation lasting approximately five days that saw them reach altitudes of 1,400 km, breaking the record set by Gemini 11 in 1966.

In total, both Isaacman and Gillis remained in space for about 10 minutes, Testing the mobility capabilities of spacesuits. They then had to pressurize the spacecraft, another crucial process that took more than an hour, while the other two passengers, pilot Scott Poteet and physician Anna Menon, also waited in their seats dressed in spacesuits. The craft is not equipped with an airlock.

A big step for a nascent industry

On March 18, 1965, Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to perform a spacewalk, and such missions have since become routine for the world’s space agencies, including frequent maintenance required by the International Space Station.

However, all of these missions are conducted by government astronauts, while the Polaris Dawn mission is strictly a private sector effort that the company behind the mission, SpaceX, hopes to be a giant step towards commercializing space travel.

Founded by Elon Musk in 2002, the space company has sought to reduce the costs of spaceflight in hopes that, in the future, humanity might be able to live and work off Earth, including planning an ambitious mission to colonize Mars. Efforts that NASA also supports, with the head of the US space agency, Bill Nelson, tweeting on X that “Today’s success represents a major step forward for the commercial space industry and NASA’s long-term goal of building a vibrant American space economy.””.

In addition to the spacewalk, Polaris Dawn astronauts will be required to conduct 36 experiments over the five or six days of the mission. These range from testing novel contact lenses with microelectronic components that continuously monitor changes in eye shape and pressure to testing laser-based satellite communications between the spacecraft and Starlink, SpaceX’s network of more than 6,000 internet satellites.