By NASA has lauded the historic accomplishment of a pioneering pair of astronauts who became the first private civilians to conduct a spacewalk as “a giant leap forward” for the commercial space industry.
Leading the way is fintech millionaire Jared Isaacman, whose SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission launched early on Tuesday from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, taking humans farther into space than any human has gone since the Apollo program in the 1970s.
The four-person crew’s Dragon spacecraft was in an orbit of 700 kilometers (434 miles) when pure oxygen started to flow into their suits on Thursday morning. This was the formal beginning of their spacewalk, which is being referred to as an “extravehicular activity.”
Soon after, Isaacman grabbed the hand and footholds as he swung open the hatch and climbed through.
After being written off by the larger industry at first, it has developed into a formidable force that defeated Boeing in 2020 to produce a spacecraft that would transport NASA humans to the International Space Station.
The crew performed a “prebreathe” operation in order to eliminate nitrogen from their bloodstream and avoid decompression sickness prior to the hatch opening. Then, in order to match the vacuum of space, the cabin pressure was gradually reduced.
Before going back inside, Isaacman and SpaceX engineer crewmate Sarah Gillis tested the suit’s next-generation features, which include improved joint mobility systems, helmet cameras, and heads-up displays, for a few minutes apiece.
An hour and forty-six minutes later, the spacewalk came to a close when the cabin was pressurized again.
The spacewalk was a first for the commercial sector, but it was not as spectacular as the audacious achievements of the early space age.
A small number of Space Shuttle astronauts even utilized jetpacks to fly entirely untethered, but early space travelers like Soviet astronaut Alexei Leonov drifted away from their spacecraft on tethers.
