SpaceX launches billionaire to perform first private spacewalk

A daredevil billionaire returned to orbit Tuesday, aiming to perform the first private spacewalk and venture further than anyone since NASA’s Apollo moon launches.

Unlike his previous charter flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman shared the costs with SpaceX this time around, which included developing and testing all-new spacesuits to see how they would hold up in the harsh vacuum.

If all goes according to plan, this will be the first time private citizens will conduct a spacewalk, but they won’t venture outside the capsule. Considered one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight, spacewalks have been reserved for professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union opened the hatch in 1965, followed closely by the United States. Today, they are routinely conducted aboard the International Space Station.

Isaacman, accompanied by two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday, the halfway point of the five-day flight.

But first, the passengers must travel far beyond the International Space Station, to an altitude of 1,400 kilometers (870 miles), which would surpass the record for orbiting the Earth set by NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured farther.

The plan calls for 10 hours at that altitude, where radiation is extremely strong and debris is plentiful, before reducing the oval orbit by half. Even at that lower altitude of 700 kilometers, the orbit would dwarf the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest the shuttle astronauts have flown.

All four wore SpaceX spacewalk suits, as the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized during the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to a hazardous environment.

Isaacman and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis will briefly take turns emerging from the hatch. They will test their custom black-and-white-trimmed suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot in contact with the capsule or the attached support structure that looks like the top of a pool ladder. They will not dangle from their 12-foot tethers or demonstrate jetpacks. Only NASA’s suits aboard the space station are equipped with jetpacks, for emergency use only.

Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX’s Anna Menon will monitor the spacewalk from inside. Like previous SpaceX astronaut flights, this one will end with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.

“We’re sending you hugs from Earth,” launch director Frank Messina radioed after the crew reached orbit. “I hope you make history and return home safely.”

Isaacman responded: “We wouldn’t be on this path without all of you, the 14,000 of SpaceX, and everyone who cheers us on.”

At a news conference before the flight, Isaacman, CEO and founder of credit card processing company Shift4, declined to say how much he had invested in the flight. “No chance,” he said.

SpaceX partnered with Isaacman to pay for the spacesuit’s development and associated costs, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president who previously led space mission operations for NASA.

“We’re really starting to push the boundaries with the private sector,” Gerstenmaier said.

This is the first of three trips that Isaacman bought from Elon Musk two and a half years ago, shortly after he returned from his first private space flight with SpaceX in 2021. Isaacman funded the sightseeing trip for an undisclosed sum, taking with him the contest winners and a childhood cancer survivor. The trip raised hundreds of millions of dollars for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Development of the spacesuit took longer than expected, delaying the first flight of the so-called Polaris Dawn until now. The training was intensive; Poteet said it rivaled anything he had experienced in his Air Force flying career.

As SpaceX astronaut trainers, Gillis and Menon helped Isaacman and his previous team, as well as NASA’s professional crews, prepare for their voyages.

“I wasn’t alive when humans walked on the moon. I would really like my kids to see humans walk on the moon and Mars, and venture out and explore our solar system,” Isaacman, 41, said before the launch.

Bad weather caused a two-week delay. The crew needed favorable weather forecasts not only for the launch, but also for splashdown a few days later. With limited supplies and no way to reach the space station, they had no choice but to wait for conditions to improve.

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