First successful private spacewalk for SpaceX
This is a historic first. Two non-professional astronauts went for a spacewalk outside their ship. SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission was to test the suits.
Elon Musk won his bet. Two members of Polaris Dawn successfully challenged themselves to exit their SpaceX Dragon ship for an extravehicular spacewalk on Thursday, September 12, 2024. This is the first time that such an exercise has been carried out by non-professional astronauts. The two crew members who were able to feel the vacuum of space outside the capsule were American billionaire Jared Isaacman. He emerged first in his white and gray suit. He then gave way to Sarah Gillis.
Exceptional viewpoint
The two members of Polaris Dawn were at a rather high orbit of 700km. This gave them a "magnificent" viewpoint of the Earth and space environment. The main objective of this mission was to test SpaceX's brand new suits. The other two crew members, who remained in the capsule, also wore the suits. Indeed, there is no airlock in Dragon, by opening the hatch, the entire ship is confronted with the vacuum of space.
(MH with Olivier Duquesne – Source: Le Soir with AFP – Picture: © Polaris Dawn – Flickr – Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0)