SpaceX pulled off its first spacewalk in the early hours of Thursday morning, in a historic first for the company.<\/p>\n
The marquee event of the private Polaris Dawn mission went smoothly, with two of the crew members \u2014 Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis \u2014 stepping outside of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule \u201cResilience.\u201d It\u2019s the first time civilians, rather than government astronauts, have performed a spacewalk.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,\u201d<\/em> Isaacman, the mission\u2019s benefactor and commander, said after emerging from the spacecraft.<\/p>\n SpaceX sees the spacewalk, otherwise known as extravehicular activity, or EVA, as a crucial milestone in its goal of sending people to other planets.<\/p>\n SpaceX spent more than two years developing suits that can protect astronauts while in the harsh environment of space alongside the Polaris Program run by Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments company Shift4. The mission is also the first to fly employees of the company, represented by mission specialist Gillis and medical officer Anna Menon.<\/p>\n The Polaris Dawn event took about two hours in total, with the full crew of four exposed to the vacuum of space after the spacecraft\u2019s hatch opened. Isaacman and Gillis spent about seven minutes each outside the capsule, with a focus on testing the mobility of the spacesuits.<\/p>\n Space X launched the mission Tuesday. In addition to the spacewalk, Polaris Dawn reached an orbit of more than 1,400 kilometers from Earth the furthest humans have traveled in space since the Apollo program and is performing about 40 science and research experiments, as well as raising funds for St. Jude Children\u2019s Research Hospital.<\/p>\n Isaacman, who first traveled to space leading the Inspiration4 mission in 2021, said he is leading the Polaris Program in an effort to push the boundaries of private spaceflight.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the inspiration side of it … anything that\u2019s different than what we\u2019ve seen over the last 20 or 30 years is what gets people excited, thinking: \u2018Well if this is what I\u2019m seeing today, I wonder what tomorrow\u2019s gonna look like or a year after,\u2019\u201d Isaacman\u00a0said\u00a0before the mission.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" SpaceX pulled off its first spacewalk in the early hours of Thursday morning, in a historic first for the company. The marquee event of the private Polaris Dawn mission went smoothly, with two of the crew members \u2014 Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis \u2014 stepping outside of SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule \u201cResilience.\u201d It\u2019s the first time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":48378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173,180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48379,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48377\/revisions\/48379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}