Space X just conducted its first private spacewalk by sending daredevil billionaire Jared Isaacman than anyone has gone since NASA’s Apollo moonshots. The cost of the mission was split between Isaacman and Space X, which is significant considering that the mission had to develop new space suits to see how they would work in the harsh vacuum of space.
If the mission goes as planned, this will be the first time private citizens conduct a spacewalk, but the passengers of the mission will not venture away from the capsule. This is considered one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight.
Spacewalks have been exclusive to astronauts since 1965
Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot launched before dawn aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The spacewalk was scheduled for Thursday morning, September 12th, and Jared Isaacman became the first individual who is not an astronaut to complete a spacewalk.
As he stepped into space, Isaacman said, “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world.” The billionaire is now back in the spacecraft waiting for it to descend back onto Earth.
The spacewalk took place way past the International Space Station at an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), which surpassed the record set during NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 astronauts from the Apollo missions have ventured farther.
The mission’s spacewalk involved a Space X engineer alongside billionaire Isaacman
The first spacewalking test was more of a stretch than a walk. Jared Isaacman kept a hand or a foot attached to the capsule at all times as he flexed his limbs to see how the spacesuit held together.
After almost 10 minutes in space, Isaacman was replaced by another crew member to go through the same motion experiments. The Space X engineer was next in the spacewalk schedule and went up and down in weightlessness but made sure to not go higher than her knees out of the capsule, essentially twisting her arms and sending reports back to mission control.
This successful spacewalk is expected to continue the trend of billionaires and millionaires putting down astronomical sums of money to do “space tourism.” This category of flight covers everything from briefly experiencing weightlessness to even spending days and weeks in space.
This experience will no doubt motivate more billionaires to try spacewalking themselves, which again, is incredibly dangerous.
This is why this mission was planned down to the minute with almost no room for error. Everything had to be perfect. What made the mission so dangerous, however, were the spacesuit tryouts and the fact that the Space X capsule was exposed to the vacuum of space throughout the entirety of the mission.
