The Polaris Dawn mission by Elon Musk's Space X is on the verge of pulling off the world’s first privately managed spacewalk. The mission, which blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday, has four crew members: ex-US Air Force pilot Scott Poteet, mission specialist Anna Menon, billionaire Jared Isaacman, who is leading the mission, and Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer.
Updates posted on X by SpaceX showed Isaacman and Gillis rising out of the hatch for suit mobility tests. "This sure looks like a perfect world," Isaacman was quoted as having said by The Guardian.
As the hatch of the spacecraft opened around 4 pm, SpaceX said it marked "the first time four humans are simultaneously exposed to the vacuum of space".
A report by NBC News said the spacewalk, also called extravehicular activity (EVA), is supposed to last for 20 minutes.
In addition to this, the mission will test SpaceX’s new spacesuits, which come with in-built cameras, thermal management systems and heads-up displays. The company has spent the past few years building its EVA suit from its intra-vehicular activity (IVA) suit. According to the statement given on the Polaris Program website, the spacecraft will be orbiting at approximately 700 kilometres above the Earth and be passing through portions of the Van Allen radiation belt. The team will also conduct research to "understand the effects of spaceflight and space radiation on human health".
Spacewalk, first undertaken on March 18, 1965, during the peak of the space race, has been associated with considerable risks. For example, when Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov took the first-ever spacewalk lasting for 12 minutes, his suit blew up. He had to modify his suit as he could not fit through the airlock. He also suffered decompression sickness and sustained injuries due to rapid decompression. Similarly, during a 2013 mission, the helmet of European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano began filling with water after a leak in the suit's ventilation system.