A giant leap for commercial spaceflight
Early this morning, the billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and a SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis conducted the first-ever commercial space walk as part of the Polaris Dawn mission, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX that seeks to advance the state of the art in human spaceflight.
What happened? Due to their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft lacking an airlock, the space walks involved purging all air from the crew cabin, requiring all its occupants to wear new SpaceX-designed space suits. While Isaacman and Gillis took 10-minute turns clambering partway out of their spacecraft in low-Earth orbit during the 2-hour livestreamed event, their crewmates—aviator Scott Poteet and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon—stayed inside as a situational safeguard. All four astronauts were working in the vacuum of space, the most ever at one time. After brief forays into the void, the crew closed the hatch and repressurized the cabin, bringing the space walks to a triumphant conclusion.
Why does it matter? The primary objective of Polaris Dawn's space walks was to test the new space suits, which passed with flying colors. Suits such as these could someday be used by astronauts on the moon, Mars, or any number of other extraterrestrial destinations. But the overarching goal was to show that bold feats of astronautical derring-do are no longer the sole purview of government space programs. Isaacman has, for instance, lobbied NASA for permission to conduct a similar mission to the agency's Hubble Space Telescope, seeking to refurbish that aging orbital observatory through additional space walks. --Lee Billings
