Private space missions are no longer just an adrenaline-filled attraction for millionaire tourists, who pay very expensive tickets to make a suborbital flight of just a few minutes, thanks to which they can prove that they have been in space. Now there are also space travelers who make activities that allow them to call themselves astronautsaccording to the new definition of the word. The mission Polar Dawn makes history in this new chapter of commercial spaceflight: after breaking the absolute orbital height record this WednesdayToday, Thursday, they carried out the first two private space walks; that is, made by astronauts who do not belong to any space agency such as NASA or ESA.
Tech mogul Jared Isaacman and aerospace engineer Sarah Gillis have pulled off the world's riskiest maneuver. Polar Dawn which began today at 11:58, Spanish peninsula time. At that moment, they began the final checks before opening the hatch of the Resiliencea Crew Dragon spacecraft that Space X adapted for this innovative five-day spaceflight, which took off from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday (Florida, United States).
At 12:13, mission control from Earth gave its final approval and the order to begin the operation, which actually began after a little over 35 minutes, when the spacesuits were filled with air and then the compartment depressurized to almost a vacuum. Since this space capsule does not have a compartment that acts as an airlock, when billionaire Jared Isaacman and the mission commander manually opened the hatch, the four crew members – dressed in the new SpaceX spacesuits – felt what it means to be in open space, in a complete vacuum. At that time, the ship was at the apogee of its orbit, which had been reduced to a maximum distance of approximately 740 kilometers after setting a historic record yesterday by exceeding 1,400 kilometers in distance.
After 12:50, Jared Isaacman took part of his body out of the ship and began to do mobility tests on the spacesuit: “SpaceX, when we get home, we're going to have a lot of work to do, but from here, it looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said while contemplating the Earth, before the explosion of joy in mission control, in the facilities of Elon Musk's company.
After more than 10 minutes of partially floating in space, and still clinging to one of the bars of the Skywalker device mounted in the ship's dome, Isaacman returned to the ship's interior. Resilience and it was Sarah Gillis' turn. SpaceX's first astronaut performed the exact same spacesuit mobility checks before re-entering the ship and closing the hatch. After repressurizing the ship, Mission Control has terminated the operationwith a total duration of 1 hour and 46 minutes.
Thus ended the first test in space of the new SpaceX spacesuitwhich is of the latest generation and is used for activities inside and outside the ship – both for take-off and landing as well as for spacewalks – but which has a meaning ancient: an umbilical cord comes out of it which connects the astronauts to the ship's systems and allows them to breathe, as they did at the beginning of the space age the first suits for activities in space outside the ship. Later, autonomous suits were imposed, which integrate a case of survival; These are those used by the astronauts who walked on the Moon during the program. Apollo such as those who have performed spacewalks from shuttles or the ISS and other orbital stations.
Gillis and Isaacman, both Americans, entered the select club of just over 250 people who have traveled through space, something previously reserved for astronauts from NASA, ESA and the Russian, Canadian, Chinese and Japanese space agencies.
This is the second space mission for Jared Isaacman (41), a technology tycoon who is also an airline pilot and commercial astronaut. As is currently the case with Polar Dawnalso Isaacman funded and was the commander in 2021 of Inspiration4SpaceX's first orbital mission with an all-civilian crew. Sarah Gillis (30) is an aerospace engineer at Elon Musk's company, where she is responsible for the astronaut training program and also has extensive ground experience in space mission control. This is her first spaceflight and she had already made history on Wednesday when, together with her mission partner Anna Menon, she became the woman who flew the furthest from Earth. In addition, no SpaceX employee had flown into space before them.
The departure of Isaacman and Gillis was the most critical moment of the mission and, although it occurred on the third day of the flight, the four crew members had been preparing for this extravehicular activity for nearly 48 hours. Shortly after the launch, after completing their first orbit around the Earth, they began a series of breathing exercises aimed at avoiding the decompression syndrome. In a similar way to the illness that divers can suffer when they return to the surface after being submerged tens of meters underwater – experiencing a much higher pressure than normal – astronauts must adapt to be able to go from the normal pressure inside a ship to being surrounded by the complete vacuum of open space.
An unusual space walk
Like back then the official definition of an astronaut had to be changed —in order to include those who actively participate in commercial space missions, but not just any space tourist—, after what was seen today in the online broadcast offered by SpaceX, what is meant by spacewalk could also change.
In the astronautics community, there is some controversy because this Wednesday the astronauts did not completely leave the ship: it is an unusual type of extravehicular activity, which has been practiced mainly at the beginning of several space programs. Of course, strictly speaking, Isaacman and Gillis did not walk. Nor did they let go of the Skywalker craft, whose name honors to the greatest hero of the cinematographic saga Star Warsbut it's still really a “walker for heaven.” That's what the word literally means in English.
Neither astronauts nor spacewalks are what they used to be: nothing is the same in this new space age, in which the private company SpaceX has begun to to exceed limits that were previously only within the reach of space agencies like NASA. This is just a first attempt, which can be embellished in a more or less epic way and which can be criticized as a whim of billionaires; But today, for the first time in history, two private citizens got out of a spaceship and observed their planet for about 10 minutes, several hundred kilometers away.
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