Polaris Dawn | First private spacewalk in history

The Polaris Dawn mission, carried out aboard a SpaceX capsule, carried out the first private spacewalk in history on Thursday morning. The crew is made up of four non-professional astronauts.

“This is the first time that four humans have been exposed to the vacuum of space at the same time,” SpaceX said on X. The social network featured a video of tech billionaire Jared Isaacman with Earth in the background.

The spacewalk was conducted by Mr. Isaacman and a SpaceX engineer, Sarah Gillis. They took half their bodies out of the capsule Crew Dragon SpaceX, for 15 minutes each, holding on to a support bar. They conducted three mobility tests of the suit.

The crew also includes a former American military pilot and another SpaceX engineer.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the crew acclimated to an oxygen supply under spacesuits. Since Dragon capsules do not have airlocks, the four astronauts wore one, because the vacuum of space invaded Dragon’s interior. The spacesuit is an improved version of the one worn by Dragon passengers.

Mr. Isaacman, who has already paid for a first private mission, Inspiration4 in 2021, financed the adaptation of the capsule with SpaceX Crew Dragon to enable spacewalks, as well as the modification of SpaceX’s spacesuit. On X, SpaceX indicated shortly before the spacewalk that colonizing the Moon and Mars would require “thousands of spacesuits.”

The mission reached an altitude of 1,400 kilometers on Tuesday, the highest of any manned orbital mission. For comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope has an orbit of 535 kilometers and the space station and the International Space Station have an orbit of 400 kilometers. Apart from the Apollo lunar missions between 1969 and 1972, the altitude record was previously held by the American Gemini 11 mission in 1966, which was 35 kilometers less than Polaris Dawn.

M^me Gillis and her teammate Anna Menon are now the women to have reached the highest altitude in history. The record was held by American Kathryn Sullivan, who in 1990 was part of the shuttle Discovery mission that put Hubble into orbit.

The spacewalk took place at an altitude of 700 kilometers, under the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field. The aim was to avoid radiation from the “van Allen belt”, which is more harmful because it is no longer intercepted by the Earth’s magnetic field.