As the two astronauts returned to their cabin seats, SpaceX ground teams at the company’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters watched as the capsule’s hatch door sealed shut and carried out leak checks.
Isaacman, Gillis, Scott Poteet, 50, a retired US air force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, 38, had been orbiting Earth aboard Crew Dragon since Tuesday’s pre-dawn launch from Florida of the Polaris Dawn mission. Menon and Poteet remained inside the spacecraft during the spacewalk.
It is the Musk-led company’s latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight.
Isaacman, a pilot and billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4, is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.
He has declined to say how much he is paying, but the missions are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, based on Crew Dragon’s price of roughly $55m (R979m) a seat for other flights.
Nasa administrator Bill Nelson praised the spacewalk. The agency helped fund Crew Dragon development beginning roughly a decade ago.
“Today’s success represents a giant leap forward for the commercial space industry and @Nasa’s long-term goal to build a vibrant US space economy,” Nelson wrote on X.
Throughout Wednesday, the craft circled Earth at least six times in an oval orbit as shallow as 190km and stretching out as far as 1,400km, the farthest in space humans have travelled since the last US Apollo mission in 1972.
The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft then began to lower its orbit into a peak 700km position and adjust cabin pressure to ready for the spacewalk, formally called Extravehicular Activity (EVA), the Polaris programme said on Wednesday.
“The crew also spent a few hours demonstrating the suit’s pressurised mobility, verifying positions and accessibility in microgravity along with preparing the cabin for the EVA,” it said.
Only government astronauts with several years of training have done spacewalks in the past.