A crew of four astronauts made history in the early hours of Thursday morning when they opened the hatch of their SpaceX Dragon capsule and performed the first commercial spacewalk.
The spacewalk is the most dangerous part of the five-day journey. Polaris Dawn The mission lifted off at 6:12 a.m. EDT when oxygen began flowing into the astronauts’ spacesuits. Only two of the four crew members actually exited the spacecraft, but all four had to wear the new SpaceX-made suits because the Dragon capsule doesn’t have an air chamber. That meant the entire spacecraft had to be depressurized.
A spacewalk—sometimes called an extravehicular activity—is when astronauts leave the relative safety of their spacecraft into the vacuum of space. In the history of human spaceflight, spacewalks have only been performed by government astronauts, who use them as an opportunity to make repairs, maintain, or conduct scientific experiments. Spacewalks by NASA astronauts typically last between five and eight hours.
Billionaire entrepreneur and mission commander Jared Isaacman was the first to step outside the Dragon capsule; after returning, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis took a turn in the vacuum of space. They used a special ladder-mobility aid called a “Skywalker,” which SpaceX added to Dragon just for this purpose, to help them out of the capsule. The pair were connected to the spacecraft by umbilical cords and remained connected to the ladder at all times. The spacewalk was a quick affair, with each person outside the spacecraft for less than ten minutes. During that time, Isaacman and Gillis performed a series of movements to test the suits’ mobility and performance.
“Back home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here the world looks perfect,” Isaacman said.
SpaceX’s spacesuits are significantly lighter than the bulky white suits worn by NASA astronauts, and the company says they are designed with “ease of movement in mind.”
One of the biggest differences between the spacesuits designed by NASA and those designed by SpaceX is the lack of a bulky white backpack, called the Basic Life Support System. Instead, the basic life support systems are provided by a 12-foot umbilical cord attached to the spacecraft.
As the duo took turns exiting the spacecraft, the rest of the crew, former U.S. Air Force pilot Scott “Kid” Poteet and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, carefully monitored their progress. After Gillis closed the hatch, the spacecraft was gradually repressurized. The entire process took less than two hours.
This remarkable achievement is a major boon for SpaceX’s private spaceflight ambitions, which include sending a private crewed mission to Mars. If SpaceX succeeds, the suits worn by humans traveling to the Red Planet will likely be inspired by the spacesuits worn by Isaacman and his Polaris Dawn crewmates.
“While the Polaris Dawn flight will be the first time a SpaceX exosuit has been used in low Earth orbit, the ultimate destination of the suit lies far beyond our home planet,” the company said in May. “Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require developing a scalable design for the millions of spacesuits needed to help make life multiplanetary.”
This isn’t the first milestone for Polaris Dawn’s mission. After launching early Tuesday morning atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the capsule fired its thrusters to propel the crew to a high point of 1,400 kilometers (870 miles) — higher than any altitude humans have traveled to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
Now that those two milestones have been achieved, the Polaris Dawn crew will spend their remaining days in orbit conducting a series of science experiments and continuing to test laser communications between the capsule and Starlink internet satellites. The crew is likely to return in the early hours of Sunday morning and splash down off the coast of Florida, though SpaceX has yet to release a firm schedule for their return to Earth.