A US billionaire aiming to perform the first private spacewalk has blasted off from Florida on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on a five-day mission.
The spacewalk is scheduled for Thursday and is designed in part to test a new upgraded spacesuit, before the crew of five splash back down off the Florida coast.
The spacecraft, named Resilience, which launched on Tuesday, will also venture farther than anyone since NASA’s Apollo programme ended in the 1970s, reaching an orbit altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometres).
The crew will also conduct up to 40 experiments, including inter-satellite laser communication between the spacecraft and Space X’s Starlink satellite constellation.
Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman is sharing the cost of the flight and is accompanied by a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former United States Air Force pilot. The CEO and founder of the credit card processing company, Shift4, declined to say how much he invested in the flight.
“We’re really starting to push the frontiers with the private sector,” said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president who once headed space mission operations for NASA.
“We’re sending you hugs from the ground,” Launch Director Frank Messina radioed after the crew reached orbit. “May you make history and come home safely,” he added.
Isaacman replied, “We wouldn’t be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back at SpaceX and everyone else cheering us on.”
The mission, called Polaris Dawn, is the first of three trips that Isaacman bought from SpaceX founder Elon Musk two and half years ago, soon after returning from his first private SpaceX spaceflight in 2021 that raised hundreds of millions for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital, a leading paediatric cancer centre in the US.
Spacewalk milestone
The spacewalk, which is scheduled to last two hours, is considered one of the riskiest parts of spaceflight and has been the sole realm of professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union popped open the hatch in 1965, closely followed by the US.
Isaacman and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis will test their new astronaut suits by twisting their bodies while maintaining a hand or foot touching the capsule.
There will be no floating in space at the end of a tether or with jetpacks. The aim is to make spacesuits an easier fit for all shapes and sizes of astronauts to reduce costs as human spaceflight becomes more commonplace.
While some people are critical of billionaires buying their way into space history as amateur astronauts, in this case, Isaacman is the commander of the mission and the most experienced astronaut on board as he is the only crew member who has been to space before.
“I wasn’t alive when humans walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars, and venturing out and exploring our solar system,” the 41-year-old Isaacman said before liftoff.
