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Two astronauts have floated into space in the first privately funded spacewalk, boosting the prospects for exploration missions undertaken by commercial crews.
As billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman emerged from SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, silhouetted against the glowing globe of Earth more 700km below him, he said: “This sure looks like a perfect world.”
SpaceX employees watching from mission control applauded as Isaacman removed the hatch from the capsule, which had been completely depressurised for the walk, and manoeuvred himself out into space.
After a few minutes he re-entered Dragon and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis took his place, testing the mobility of the company’s new spacesuits designed for long-distance missions. When she was back inside, the hatch was closed and the capsule repressurised with oxygen and nitrogen.
Although the two spacewalkers were attached to long tethers, they did not unfurl them and float out into space, as astronauts have done while undertaking repairs at the International Space Station. Both remained near to Dragon’s open hatch.
The two other members of the Polaris Dawn mission, pilot Scott ‘Kidd’ Poteet and medical officer Anna Menon, remained inside Dragon to monitor vital support systems as Isaacman and then Gillis ventured outside.
Although the two spacewalks took about half an hour, the whole operation, including depressurisation, repressurisation and associated safety procedures such as testing for leaks, lasted almost two hours. Almost 300 previous spacewalks have been undertaken by astronauts or cosmonauts from public space agencies.
A Falcon 9 rocket launched Dragon from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday. The mission then made history when the Dragon capsule’s elliptical orbit took it more than 1,400km above Earth, meaning the crew were farther from home than any humans since the US Apollo astronauts who travelled to the Moon more than 50 years ago.
The International Space Station orbits the Earth at about 400km altitude.
The crew are conducting research into the effects of space flights on human health. The astronauts are being monitored for signs of venous gas emboli, which form when tiny bubbles form in the bloodstream, and gathering data on the effects of the high radiation levels in space on human biology.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions for which Isaacman, founder of the Shift4 Payments company, is believed to have paid SpaceX hundreds of millions of dollars to help fund commercial crewed operations.
The project will culminate with a flight on Starship, the world’s most powerful rocket, which is designed to carry people “to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and beyond”.
Isaacman has declined to disclose the size of his investment.
The mission is due to finish on Saturday, returning to Earth by parachuting into the ocean off the coast of Florida, where a ship will retrieve the spacecraft and crew.
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