Crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis took turns floating just outside the Dragon capsule while wearing specially-designed suits.
SpaceX has performed the first private spacewalk during the Polaris Dawn mission, viewing Earth 458 miles below. Crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis took turns floating just outside the Dragon capsule while wearing specially-designed suits.
After having its launch delayed due to the FAA grounding all SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets following an incident where a booster burst into flames shortly after landing atop a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, Polaris Dawn successfully launched this past Tuesday. The historic mission, comprised of billionaire Jared Isaacman, Scott Poteet, and two SpaceX employees, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis, is the first of three flights Isaacman purchased from SpaceX in 2022. It was also the first privately-financed mission to perform a spacewalk in the history of space exploration.
As Isaacman took his first steps outside the Dragon capsule early Thursday, he took a moment to take it all in and remarked, “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”https://t.co/svdJRkGN7K
SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 12, 2024
The crew began preparations for the spacewalk shortly after liftoff, according to SpaceX. The crew all took part in a two-day pre-breathe process designed to prevent decompression sickness by slowly acclimatizing the crew to lower pressures, while also slowly increasing oxygen levels with the spacecraft’s cabin.
