Jared Isaacman floats just below the hatch of his SpaceX dragon capsule while he awaits the first private spacewalk.
SpaceX broadcast/Screenshot by NPR
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SpaceX broadcast/Screenshot by NPR
An internet entrepreneur and a SpaceX engineer are on their way to becoming the first private astronauts to walk in space.
Watch the video, livestreamed by Spacex.
Jared Isaacman, who has amassed a fortune through his online payment company Shift4, paid for the mission, known as Polaris Dawn. He will spend a few brief minutes outside his SpaceX Dragon capsule looking down on Earth, followed by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis.
The mission’s two other astronauts, Scott Poteet, a former Air Force pilot who works for Isaacman, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, will remain inside the capsule to support the spacewalkers.
Until now, walking in space was the sole purview of professional astronauts. Spacewalks are regularly conducted outside the International Space Station, for example, to perform essential maintenance and run experiments. Those spacewalks can last several hours and usually follow a grueling schedule that allows minimal time for enjoying the view.
In many ways, today’s spacewalk is a throwback to the earliest days of the space program. SpaceX’s new spacesuits look modern, but they don’t have self-contained life support. The astronauts are receiving oxygen through umbilicals, similar to the spacewalks of the Gemini missions in the 1960s. Isaacman and Gillis aren’t going far. They will bob just outside the hatch, holding onto a special set of rails that SpaceX has dubbed skywalker.
Spacewalks are one of the riskiest parts of space travel. Spacesuits are essentially tiny spacecraft. They must provide life support and temperature control to the astronauts, who are exposed to huge temperature swings in the vacuum of space. Problems on spacewalks are not uncommon, and they can be serious — in 2013, Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano nearly drowned in space, after water from his suit’s cooling system leaked into his helmet.
If successful, the spacewalk will be a major milestone for SpaceX. Spacesuits are an essential part of space travel, and the company hopes they can be used one day to get to the Moon and Mars.