Billionaire Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis, an engineer, have become the first non-professional crew to perform one of the riskiest manoeuvres in space – a spacewalk.
They stepped out of the SpaceX spacecraft around 15 minutes apart, starting at 11:52BST, on September 12, wearing specially-designed suits.
“Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Jared Isaacman said as he exited.
It was commercially funded by Jared Isaacman. Before, only astronauts with government-funded space agencies had done a spacewalk.
Images broadcast live showed the two crew emerge from the white Dragon capsule to float 435 miles above the blue Earth below.
Jared Isaacman, 41, emerged first, wiggling his limbs, hands and feet to test his suit. He returned back inside the hatch, and Sarah Gillis, who works for SpaceX, then climbed out.
Both crew narrated their spacewalk, describing how their suits performed outside of the craft.
The walk, originally scheduled for 07:23BST, was postponed.
Anticipation and tension grew as the crew prepared to open the hatch on the craft that has no air lock, or doorway between the vacuum outside and the rest of the spacecraft.
The four crew members spent two days “pre-breathing” to prevent becoming seriously ill from decompression sickness, known as getting “the bends”, as the pressure changed. That involves replacing nitrogen in the blood with oxygen.
The craft was then depressurised to bring it closer to the conditions of the space vacuum outside.
In recent decades astronauts used an airlock that separates most of a craft from the space vacuum outside – but this SpaceX Dragon capsule was in effect entirely exposed to space outside.
But it was not without major risks.
Jared Isaacman, who funded the Polaris Dawn mission, was the only member of the four-person crew on the Polaris mission to have previously been to space.
He is commander on the Resilience spacecraft with his close friend Scott ‘Kidd’ Poteet, who is a retired air force pilot, and two SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.
The Dragon capsule the team have flown in launched to space 46 times before, taking 50 crew in total. However, the capsule and the spacesuits are not subject to regulation and were untested in this environment.
Spacewalks are one of the most difficult manouevres in space, so the fact that a private company has pulled it off is a milestone in the history of space travel.
This walk at 435 miles was higher than any previous walk, and used innovative technology in the new extravehicular activity (EVA) astronaut suits.
