SpaceX sends crew on first private spacewalk mission

A four-person crew of astronauts blasted off into space early Tuesday morning on a risky SpaceX mission to undertake the first-ever private spacewalk, using the company’s new spacesuits and a redesigned spacecraft.

The billionaire entrepreneur, retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees were launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, the craft’s fifth private space mission.

The SpaceX mission, called Polaris Dawn, will last about five days and fly in an oval orbit that will be between 190 kilometers and 1,400 kilometers from Earth. It will be the farthest distance ever traveled by humans since the end of the American Apollo lunar program in 1972.

The spacewalk is scheduled for the third day of the mission at an altitude of 700 km and will last about 20 minutes. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft will slowly decompress the entire cabin — there is no airlock like the International Space Station (ISS) — and all four astronauts will rely on their lightweight SpaceX-built spacesuits for oxygen.

The first American spacewalk took place in 1965 aboard a Gemini capsule, using a procedure similar to Polaris Dawn: the capsule was depressurized, the hatch was opened, and an astronaut in a spacesuit emerged on a tether.

Only highly trained, well-funded government astronauts have performed spacewalks in the past. There have been about 270 since the ISS was launched in 2000, 16 by Chinese astronauts at the Tiangong space station in Beijing.

Scope of planned experiments

Jared Isaacman, the 41-year-old pilot and billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is financing the Polaris mission, as he did for SpaceX’s Inspiration4 flight in 2021. He declined to say how much he will pay for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

He is accompanied by mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30, and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers at the company.

During the spacewalk, Isaacman and Gillis will exit the spacecraft tethered to an oxygen tube, while Poteet and Menon will remain in the cabin.

The mission is the first in Isaacman’s private Polaris program, which will include a future Crew Dragon mission and then a flight aboard SpaceX’s Starship, a giant rocket being developed at a multibillion-dollar cost as a flagship vehicle for the moon and Mars.

The four-person crew will essentially be test subjects for a series of scientific experiments aimed at understanding the effects of cosmic radiation and the vacuum of space on the human body. These experiments will complement decades of research on astronauts living aboard the ISS.

Since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011, NASA has relied heavily on the company and its Crew Dragon aircraft, which has flown nine astronaut missions to and from the ISS for the agency. It is the only American manned spacecraft in service.

The company has completed four private missions to date: Isaacman’s Inspiration4 and three private astronaut flights organized by Houston-based mission broker Axiom Space.

Last month’s launch attempt was postponed hours before liftoff due to a small helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX’s launch pad. SpaceX repaired the leak, but the company’s Falcon 9 was grounded by U.S. regulators due to a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch.

Boeing has been struggling to develop a similar spacecraft, Starliner, that could compete with Crew Dragon. But NASA’s latest Starliner test mission, which launched in June — the first time it has flown with a crew — stranded its astronauts on the ISS last week because of problems with its propulsion system.