Polaris Dawn: Billionaire completes first private spacewalk
The walk, originally scheduled for 07:23BST, was postponed early on Thursday.
Anticipation and tension grew as the crew prepared to open the hatch on the craft that has no air lock, or doorway between the vacuum outside and the rest of the spacecraft.
The four crew members spent two days “pre-breathing” to prevent becoming seriously ill from decompression sickness, known as getting “the bends”, as the pressure changed. That involves replacing nitrogen in the blood with oxygen.
The craft was then depressurised to bring it closer to the conditions of the space vacuum outside.
This type of space walk took a “very different approach” to previous walks from, for example, the International Space Station, according to Dr Simeon Barber, research scientist at the Open University.
In recent decades astronauts used an airlock that separates most of a craft from the space vacuum outside – but this SpaceX Dragon capsule was in effect entirely exposed to space outside.
“It’s really exciting and I think it shows again that SpaceX is not afraid to do things in a different way,” he told BBC News.
But it was not without major risks.
Mr Isaacman, who funded the Polaris Dawn mission, was the only member of the four-person crew on the Polaris mission to have previously been to space.
He is commander on the Resilience spacecraft with his close friend Scott ‘Kidd’ Poteet, who is a retired air force pilot, and two SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.
The Dragon capsule the team have flown in launched to space 46 times before, taking 50 crew in total. However, the capsule and the spacesuits are not subject to regulation and were untested in this environment.
