SpaceX early on Tuesday launched an all-private astronaut crew to orbit that intends to make history by completing the first spacewalk conducted by nongovernment astronauts, as well as traveling farther than any human spaceflight mission since the Apollo moon landings.
The mission, an all-commercial flight that does not involve NASA, is scheduled to last up to five days and reach a maximum altitude of about 870 miles, or more than 600 miles farther than the International Space Station. The spacecraft would come back down to a lower altitude of about 435 miles, where the crew would put on their spacesuits and open the hatch of the spacecraft, exposing it to the vacuum of space.
Isaacman and Gillis would take turns venturing outside the hatch for about 15 minutes each, while tethered to the spacecraft by umbilicals, and using hand and foot rails that SpaceX built for the mission.
Isaacman said he was inspired by NASA astronaut Ed White, who performed the first American spacewalk during the Gemini program in 1965 and floated away from his spacecraft. Isaacman and Gillis won’t float away from Dragon, but rather stay in contact with the Skywalker with their hands and feet. White’s tethered free-floating “looks very cool, and it was inspirational,” Isaacman said before the flight. But it is also risky and unnecessary for gathering the data they need on the spacesuit, he said.
“I think we want to learn from history on this one and try and always maintain at least one point of contact with mobility aid,” he said. Isaacman, the founder of Shift4 Payments, a payments processing company, has declined to say how much he is paying for the flight.
The spacewalk is intended to test SpaceX’s new spacesuit, which is designed to protect the astronauts from the extreme thermal environment in space, as well as against radiation. Ultimately, SpaceX intends to use the spacesuits for astronauts on the moon and Mars, as well. SpaceX’s Dragon capsule does not have an airlock, meaning all four crew members would need to put on spacesuits as they open the hatch.
The flight would also for the first time allow WiFi connectivity in the cabin using SpaceX’s Starlink system.
Isaacman led another all-private citizen spaceflight mission in 2021. Called Inspiration4, the crew spent three days orbiting Earth in Dragon. Under what he calls the Polaris program, Isaacman intends to continue to push boundaries over three additional flights that would culminate in the first crewed launch of SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket.
The program is another example of how the commercial space sector is transforming exploration and eroding governments’ long-held monopoly on space. But the strides SpaceX makes will ultimately benefit NASA, the company has said.
“We leverage off of what we learned from NASA in some ways, and then we push it a little bit further in other areas,” Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and reliability, said during a briefing last month. “Then we share with each other what we know, what we don’t know, and we really test and evaluate and make sure we’re going forward and doing things the right way.”
Gerstenmaier spent much of his career at NASA and led the agency’s human spaceflight division before leaving to take a job at SpaceX, which he said is able to move faster than the government.
“This pace of development that we get to do at SpaceX is very much like the pace of development that was required back in the early Apollo days.” he said. “We’re getting a chance to do that again, where we’re really starting to push frontiers with the private sector and learning new things that we would not be able to learn by staying in the risk-free environment of here on Earth.”
If all goes well, the Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to splashdown off the coast of Florida.
