Polaris Dawn: Tech billionaire completes first private spacewalk

The mission was dubbed Polaris Dawn, The New York Times reported.

He suited up and climbed out into the vacuum of space, the first time a private citizen, not an astronaut, had left the confines of a spacecraft to enter the void.

“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world,” he said.

For Isaacman, a spacewalk could be considered a misnomer of sorts as he kept a hand or foot connected to the capsule the entire time he was outside. He flexed his arms and legs to test the movement and to see how well the suit held. He also was in space for about 15 minutes. He had a 12-foot tether but didn’t go out the length of the lifeline.

When he was safely back inside the capsule, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis also did her own spacewalk, doing many of the same movements and bouncing a bit in weightlessness but no higher than her knees. She also had a 12-foot tether but didn’t go out on it.

There were a couple of hiccups with the spacewalk with Isaacman having to manually open the hatch instead of using a button. Gillis said there were some bulges in the hatch seal.

The excursions lasted less than two hours, much shorter than those done by NASA astronauts, which can last seven to eight hours as they conduct repairs and carry gear on the outside of the International Space Station.

The flight is scheduled to last five days and is the next step in the long mission to settle on Mars and other planets.

To other members of the flight crew — Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot, and Anna Menon, a SpaceX engineer — stayed on the aircraft, which was unpressurized for the walk, to monitor Isaacman and Gillis from the inside. Poteet and Menon also wore the spacesuits while they remained inside the spacecraft, the Times reported.

After the walk, the capsule was slowly repressurized with oxygen and nitrogen.

They will remain in space for a few more days to conduct the remainder of the crew’s experiments, CNN reported. The Crew Dragon spacecraft could return to Earth on Sunday morning.

Isaacman had suggested that another Polaris mission could be sent to the Hubble Space Telescope to do repairs to help the aging device continue working.

NASA administrator Bill Nelson called the SpaceX mission a “giant leap,” mimicking the words spoken by Neil Armstrong when he walked on the moon.

In addition to being a historic spacewalk, the Polaris Dawn will go down in the books as the farthest from the planet that anyone has traveled since the Apollo missions, the final of which was Apollo 17, which launched on Dec. 7, 1972, landed on the moon on Dec. 11, and returned to earth on Dec. 1.