Billionaire takes off for first ever private spacewalk

Billionaire Jared Isaacman has taken off in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for what he hopes will be the first ever privately funded spacewalk.

The mission, called Polaris Dawn, is the first of three funded by the founder of payments processing business Shift4.

He is onboard as commander alongside his close friend Scott ‘Kidd’ Poteet, who is a retired air force pilot, and two SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.

The spacecraft, called Resilience, will go into an orbit that will eventually take them up to 870 miles (1,400km) above the planet. No human has been that far since Nasa’s Apollo programme ended in the 1970s.

The astronauts will pass through a region of space known as the Van Allen belt, which has high levels of radiation, but the crew will be protected by the spacecraft and their newly upgraded spacesuits.

A few passes of the belt will expose them to the equivalent of three months of the radiation astronauts experience on the International Space Station, which is within acceptable limits. They aim to study the effects that a relatively short but safe exposure has on the human body.

The crew will spend their second day in space at their maximum altitude, conducting up to 40 experiments, including intersatellite laser communication between the Dragon Spacecraft and Space X’s Starlink satellite constellation.

If all goes to plan, on day three into the mission, Mr Isaacman and Sarah Gillis are expected to attempt the first ever privately funded spacewalk, which is scheduled to last two hours.

This will be while they are 700km in orbit. The astronauts will be testing new extravehicular activity (EVA) astronaut suits which, as their name suggests, have been upgraded from Space X’s intravehicular activity (IVA) suits for working outside of spacecraft.

The EVA suit incorporates a heads-up display in its helmet, which provides information about the suit while it is being used. The EVA suits are said to be comfortable and flexible enough to be worn during launch and landing, eliminating the need to have separate IVA suits.

In an interview given while she was training for the spacewalk Ms Gillis said that it was a necessary part of Space X’s plans to send people to other worlds.

“So far only countries have been able to perform a spacewalk. Space X has huge ambitions to get to Mars and make life multiplanetary. In order to get there, we need to start somewhere. And the first step is testing out the first iteration of the EVA spacesuit so that we can make spacewalks and future suit designs even better.”

It was a sentiment echoed by Mr Isaacman.

“Space X know they need EVA capability if they are going to realise their long-term dream of populating another planet someday.” The aim is to make spacesuits less of a tailor-made garment, more able to accommodate a wider range of commercial astronaut shapes and sizes in order to reduce costs as human spaceflight becomes more commonplace.