Billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX crew trainer Sarah Gillis plan to open the forward hatch of their Polaris Dawn spacecraft taking turns floating out Thursday morning during the first non-governmental spacewalk in the history of space exploration.
Along with crewmates Anna Menon and Scott Poteet, who are monitoring the safety lines and umbilicals inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, Isaacman and Gillis plan to float out into open space around 2:23 a.m. EDT after depressurizing the spacecraft, using a scaffolding-like "Skywalker" structure that extends from the hatch for stability.
Although their feet will be just outside the hatch, they won't be "free floating" away from the Crew Dragon. Their SpaceX-designed pressure suits aren't equipped with their own oxygen supply or other life support equipment, and rely on 12-foot-long umbilical cords to provide air, power and communications.
As Isaacman and Gillis float just outside the hatch, they test the comfort and mobility of their Extreme Vehicle Activity (EVA) suits by moving their arms, hands and legs into a range of positions to find out how much effort it takes to perform simple tasks.
"We're going to use a variety of mobility aids that the SpaceX team has designed, and it's going to look like we're doing a little dance," Isaacman said before launch. "The idea is to learn as much as we can about this suit and give it back to the engineers to inform future design developments of the suit."
Cameras mounted inside and outside Crew Dragon, and other cameras attached to the spacewalkers' suits, are expected to provide spectacular views of space and the Earth below as the ship cruises through an elliptical orbit with a low point of 121 miles (195 kilometers) and an apogee of 450 miles (734 kilometers), 200 miles (322 kilometers) higher than the International Space Station.
The goal of the exercise is to ultimately perfect low-cost, easy-to-produce spacesuits for use by future commercial astronauts flying to the Moon or Mars aboard SpaceX Super Heavy Starship rockets.
"I think this journey to create affordable EVA suits that can be scaled to mass production is very worthwhile," said Isaacman, who chartered SpaceX's first fully commercial flight to orbit in 2021. "There's going to be an armada of Starships arriving on Mars in the future, and those people are going to need to be able to get out, walk around, and do important things."
Isaacman, Poteet, Menon and Gillis blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The crew immediately achieved the flight's first major objective, climbing to an altitude of 870 miles - higher than any manned spacecraft since the Apollo lunar program 60 years ago.
The highest point, or apogee, of the orbit was then lowered to 735 kilometers (450 miles) for the spacewalk and the remainder of the five-day mission.
To prevent decompression sickness, also known as decompression illness, during the crew's transition from sea level pressure to the reduced pressure of 5 psi in their spacesuits and back, flight controllers initiated a 45-hour process shortly after launch of increasing the oxygen level in the cabin while slowly reducing the air pressure to remove nitrogen from the crew's bloodstream.
"We don't anticipate that we'll experience (the bends) because a lot of preparation has gone into developing this pre-breathe protocol, which has significantly reduced that risk," said Menon, a former biomedical flight controller for NASA. "But we're prepared if we need it."
The Crew Dragon does not have an airlock, and its life support system is not designed to support spacewalks. The modifications required include "adding much more oxygen to the spacecraft, so that we can supply four suits with oxygen via umbilicals for the entire duration of the spacewalk," Gillis said.
"There have been upgrades and additions to the environmental sensors in the spacecraft to make sure that we have really good visibility, both before, during and after exposure to vacuum. And ... a whole new system, a nitrogen repression system" to repressurize the cabin after the spacewalk.
In addition to the Skywalker scaffolding, which extends just past the forward hatch, a motor drive system was added to facilitate opening and closing the hatch. Improved seals were also installed to ensure an airtight fit.
NASA astronaut Ed White performed the first American spacewalk on June 3, 1965, floating at the end of a long tether, detached from his Gemini 4 capsule. Since then, NASA astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, Chinese taikonauts and astronauts from the space station's partner nations have performed more than 470 government-sponsored spacewalks.
Isaacman said the iconic photos of White floating outside his Gemini capsule against the backdrop of Earth and space were inspiring, but he and Gillis ruled out floating separately from the Crew Dragon. And that's by design.
"We're not going to do the Ed White float," Isaacman told CBS News before the launch. "That might look cool, but it doesn't really help SpaceX learn much about (space suit) performance. It's not very useful or helpful in figuring out how to operate in a suit."
To achieve that goal, he and Gillis will run through a "matrix" of planned motions to get a sense of how the suit's various joints move under pressure. They'll also test the performance of an innovative heads-up display in the helmet and gain a better understanding of how the air-cooled suits handle the extreme temperatures of space and a host of other factors.
The suit "has all sorts of technology in it, including a heads-up display, a helmet camera, a whole new architecture for joint mobility," Gillis said. "There's thermal insulation throughout the suit, including a copper and indium tin oxide visor that provides both thermal protection and sun protection."
In addition, she said, "there's all kinds of redundancy, both in the oxygen supply to the suit, and in all the valves, all the seals in the suit. It's an incredible suit."
The heads-up display, which projects key data onto the lower left side of the helmet's visor, is a feature that NASA's decades-old spacesuits lack.
"During the EVA, we get insights into our suit, pressure, temperature, relative humidity, and also how much oxygen we used during the EVA. So some key pieces of telemetry. And it's really cool (that) you can still see it with any lighting."
The Polaris Dawn mission is the first of three that Isaacman has planned in collaboration with Musk. The second flight will be another Crew Dragon mission, while the third will be the first manned flight of SpaceX's massive Super Heavy Starship rocket, now under development in Texas.
It is not known how much Isaacman is paying for the flights or how much SpaceX itself has funded. Asked if he could share details, the entrepreneur, fighter pilot and adventurer said "not a chance."
The mission, SpaceX's fifth commercial Crew Dragon flight to orbit and the 14th to include NASA flights, is expected to last five days and conclude with a landing off the coast of Florida.
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