(BBC News) A billionaire and an engineer have become the first non-professional crew to perform one of the riskiest manoeuvres in space – a spacewalk.
Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis stepped out of the SpaceX spacecraft around 15 minutes apart, starting at 11:52 BST, wearing specially designed suits.
“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said as he exited.
It was commercially funded by Isaacman. Before, only astronauts with government-funded space agencies had done a spacewalk.
Images broadcast live showed the two crewmembers emerge from the white Dragon capsule to float 700 km above the blue Earth below.
Isaacman emerged first, wiggling his limbs, hands and feet to test his suit. He returned inside the hatch, and Gillis, who works for SpaceX, climbed out.
Both crew narrated their spacewalk, describing how their suits performed outside of the craft.
The walk, originally scheduled for 07:23 BST, was postponed early on Thursday.
Anticipation and tension grew as the crew prepared to open the hatch on the craft that has no airlock, or doorway between the vacuum outside and the rest of the spacecraft.
The four crew members spent two days “pre-breathing” to prevent becoming seriously ill from decompression sickness, known as getting “the bends”, as the pressure changed. That involves replacing nitrogen in the blood with oxygen.
The craft was then depressurized to bring it closer to the conditions of the space vacuum outside.
This type of space walk took a “very different approach” to previous walks from, for example, the International Space Station, according to Dr Simeon Barber, research scientist at the Open University.
In recent decades, astronauts used an airlock that separates most of a craft from the space vacuum outside – but this SpaceX Dragon capsule was in effect entirely exposed to space outside.
“It’s really exciting, and I think it shows again that SpaceX is not afraid to do things in a different way,” Barber told BBC News.
