Two astronauts have completed the first commercial spacewalk and tested slimmed-down spacesuits designed by SpaceX, in one of the boldest attempts yet to push the boundaries of privately funded spaceflight.
Hundreds of miles above Earth and orbiting at close to 30,000km/h (18,600mph), the billionaire Jared Isaacman, 41, who chartered the Polaris Dawn mission, exited the space capsule at 11.52am BST on Thursday.
“Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” said the 41-year-old space enthusiast as he stood on a ladder looking down at Earth’s surface.
Isaacman was followed by Sarah Gillis, a senior engineer at SpaceX who has spent years working on missions from the ground. Gillis, 30, conducted movement tests to assess how the new SpaceX suit – a much less bulky equivalent of the Nasa equipment – operates in the vacuum of space.
To prepare for the test, conducted at an altitude of 435 miles (700km), the Crew Dragon capsule was completely depressurised, meaning the whole crew – including the two who remained inside – relied on their spacesuits for oxygen and pressure.
Only well-funded government agencies had so far managed to carry out spacewalks, known as EVAs (extravehicular activities), and they are a notoriously difficult feat. Most have been done from the International Space Station (ISS) and the Chinese Tiangong space station.
Private companies are gradually taking the lead in spaceflight as governments, in particular the US government, seek to spend tax revenues elsewhere. Nasa has contracted SpaceX to land astronauts, including the first woman, on the moon this decade.
The Nasa chief, Bill Nelson, said Thursday’s successful EVA represented “a giant leap forward for the commercial space industry and Nasa’s long-term goal to build a vibrant US space economy”.
The Polaris Dawn mission is the second that Isaacman has funded. He has declined to give the price but the missions are estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
In 2021 the private pilot and now trained astronaut, who made millions from his electronic payment company Shift4, flew on the Inspiration4 mission, the first orbital spaceflight by an all-civilian crew. That mission included a cancer survivor as well as a data engineer who won his seat in a raffle draw.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has operated both missions and sees them as major milestones in making access to space easier and cheaper.
Musk plans to take astronauts back to the moon and eventually to Mars. His company is developing the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, called Starship, and has carried out four test flights of the 120-metre-tall system. The next is due in November.
Ian Whittaker, a space physics expert at Nottingham Trent University, said the success of the “first non-space agency astronaut spacewalk” was “extremely exciting for the private space industry as it is the first step on a longer road towards space tourism”.
“The high cost will mean that only the ultra-rich get to experience this for now but putting this cost in the hands of businesses means that taxpayer money can be used for other purposes,” he said.
The spacewalk lasted about 30 minutes, and Isaacman and Gillis always remained on the ladder. While walking is impossible in microgravity, Nasa defines a spacewalk as “any time an astronaut gets out of a vehicle while in space”.
The first person to “walk” in space, the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, spent 12 minutes outside his spacecraft on 18 March 1965. His mission showed some of the risks associate with designing spacesuits: by the end of the spacewalk, Leonov’s suit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could no longer fit back in the airlock. He had to manually release air to get inside.
Tim Peake, the last British astronaut to go into space, said on X that it would be very interesting to hear the crew’s full feedback on the new EVA suit mobility, something he said was “incredibly important yet hard to achieve – especially fingertip fidelity”. He added: “Elbow mobility looks great though.”
Peake, 52, has announced he has been chosen to lead a planned first all-British crewed mission into space. The UK Space Agency is undertaking it in a deal with Axiom, an American company that organises visits to the ISS.
During their five-day mission, the Polaris Dawn’s crew will act as test subjects for future deep space travel by travelling through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt and then analysing the effects of space radiation on their bodies. The mission also includes a retired US air force lieutenant colonel, Scott Poteet, 50, and another SpaceX engineer, Anna Menon, 38.
Polaris Dawn’s spacewalk happened at the same time as a record 19 astronauts orbited Earth, after Russia’s Soyuz rocket ferried two cosmonauts and a US astronaut to the ISS.