• By Mayukh Debnath
  • Thu, 12 Sep 2024 04:43 PM (IST)
  • Source:JND

SpaceX Polaris Dawn Spacewalk: The crew of billionaire Elon Musk-owned SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission scripted history on Thursday (IST) by carrying out the first-ever private spacewalk. A 41-year-old billionaire entrepreneur named Jared Isaacman was among the crew members who performed a set of spacewalk as part of a mission to test the mobility of a new line of spacesuits developed by SpaceX.

The other members of the crew of the SpaceX mission include mission pilot Scott Poteet (50), who is a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX senior engineers Sarah Gillis (30), and Anna Menon (38).  The four-member crew has been orbiting Earth aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon craft since Tuesday's pre-dawn launch from US's Florida.

PRIVATE SPACEWALK: JARED ISAACMAN SCRIPTS HISTORY

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Besides Jared Isaacman, Sarah Gillis also performed a spacewalk to test the mobility of SpaceX's newly introduced spacesuits. The duo exited the spacecraft one-by-one while tethered by an oxygen line, with Isaacman performing his spacewalk first and Gillis following suit.

Isaacman, a pilot and the founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is funding the Polaris Dawn mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021. The billionaire astronaut has refused to reveal how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, based on Crew Dragon's price of roughly $55 million a seat for other flights.

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Throughout Wednesday, Crew Dragon orbited circled the Earth at least six times in an oval-shaped trajectory as shallow as 190 km and stretching out as far as 1,400 km, the farthest in space humans have traveled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.

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The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft then began to lower its orbit into a peak 700-km (435-mile) position and adjust cabin pressure to ready for the spacewalk, formally called Extravehicular
Activity (EVA), the Polaris program said on social media on Wednesday. "The crew also spent a few hours demonstrating the suit's pressurized mobility, verifying positions and accessibility in microgravity along with preparing the cabin for the EVA," it said.

(With inputs from Reuters)