World’s first commercial spacewalk complete

We’ve wrapped up our live coverage for the day. Read more about Polaris Dawn’s historic milestone here, or scroll through the posts below to relive the first commercial spacewalk as it happened.

Polaris Dawn captured an orbital sunset on September 12.

Today’s spacewalk — the first commercial spacewalk carried out by a crew made up entirely of non-government astronauts — was historic.

But the crew members’ adventure exposed to space was only one way this mission has already made the record books.

Here’s a quick recap:

A SpaceX Starship vehicle on the launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, on January 9, 2023.

First announced in 2022, Polaris Dawn is the first of three testing and development missions under the broader Polaris Program that?Jared Isaacman said he will jointly execute and fund alongside SpaceX. (He has declined to say how much these missions cost.)

The end goal of the Polaris Program is to take the first steps toward validating technology that SpaceX will one day need if it carries humans deeper into the cosmos — including spacesuits and life-support technologies.

Few details about the second Polaris mission have been released. On its website, the Polaris Program says only that the second flight will build upon Polaris Dawn, continuing “to expand the boundaries of future human spaceflight missions, in-space communications, and scientific research.”

The third flight, however, will clearly be a large leap forward.

For that mission, Isaacman has made clear he hopes it will take flight aboard a SpaceX Starship vehicle — rather than a Crew Dragon capsule.

The Starship is still in the early stages of development. But the rocket — the largest ever created — and spacecraft system was designed with the goal of sending humans to the moon and Mars.

According to the Polaris Program website, that flight will be the first Starship mission with humans on board. That’s likely still years away.

Here’s how the program describes itself on the official website:

SpaceX teams tried to mitigate risks and prepare for every potential challenge through a barrage of tests ahead of the Polaris Dawn launch, according to Isaacman.

They even took the spacewalk suits to a testing site at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

There, the suits were struck by small pieces of debris traveling at orbital velocities to see how they could withstand hits from micrometeorites and avoid punctures that would endanger the crew, according to Isaacman.

In spaceflight parlance, those risks are referred to as MMOD, or “Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris.”

Isaacman even said in a post on X on August 27 that SpaceX specifically picked those early-morning launch times because they were the best option for putting Polaris Dawn on a path that would minimize MMOD risks.

Some small objects in space occur naturally.

But human-made space debris is a growing problem. There are potentially millions of pieces of uncontrolled garbage circling the Earth — the result of decades of satellite launches and other activities in space with few regulations to mitigate debris.

Defunct satellites have even collided in orbit, and nations including the United States, Russia and China have tested out anti-satellite, or ASAT, weapons that have destroyed satellites in space.

Putting a novel mission together in less than three years, as SpaceX did with Polaris Dawn, is incredibly fast by aerospace standards.

SpaceX teams tried to mitigate risks and prepare for every potential challenge through a barrage of tests, some as simple as putting a handrail into a freezing chamber — set to negative 90 degrees Celsius — to see how cold to the touch a ladder might be when exposed to space, Isaacman said.

Time is extremely limited for Polaris Dawn’s return home.

For the extravehicular activity (EVA) event, the crew had to lean heavily on oxygen supplies.

That means any significant delays or other issues getting the Crew Dragon back home from space in the next several days could be disastrous.

SpaceX knew that once the Crew Dragon capsule was exposed to the vacuum of space, components inside the vehicle could then vent off toxins?— a natural trait of certain materials used to make various components —?as the cabin was repressurized after the spacewalk.

To avoid that, the Crew Dragon and “a lot of the pieces of hardware that are flying in the vehicle went through basically a bake-out before we will ever go into space,” said Anna Menon, a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX who is serving as the crew’s medical officer. “What that does is it off-gasses a lot of those toxins.”

The “bake-out” involved putting the vehicle into a vacuum chamber at high temperatures, allowing the hardware to release the toxins before flight.

A SpaceX Starlink satellite in space.

Jared Isaacman, the tech CEO who partially funded this mission and is serving as commander, told CNN that with the fanfare around a historic spacewalk and the daring altitudes that Polaris Dawn will reach — a Starlink experiment that this mission will carry out may be the most fascinating and unsung aspect of the mission.

Starlink is SpaceX’s web of internet-beaming satellites. Customers on the ground already use the service for accessing the internet in remote locations across Earth.

But Polaris Dawn wants to see whether it can be put to use for in-space communication.

That could pave the way for future missions to rely on Starlink more seriously, bypassing the need to rely on older and more backlogged systems such as NASA’s TDRS satellites.

Getting Starlink to work in space is far more complicated than just turning the internet on aboard the Polaris Dawn Crew Dragon spacecraft, Isaacman said. It relies on laser links between the vehicle and the satellites, which is far more complicated than flipping a switch.

“The engineering briefs that they’ve had to work through on this is pretty incredible,” he said. “And if you’re gonna have hundreds of (spacecraft orbiting Earth) someday, you’re gonna need another communication method, and Starlink seems absolutely ideal for it.”

The Polaris Dawn crew has also promised to reveal a “surprise” demonstration of using Starlink in space later in the mission.

Jared Isaacman participates in spacewalk training in 2022.

Sarah Gillis told CNN in August that SpaceX took some creative approaches to testing the company’s brand new extravehicular activity (EVA) suits before flight.

“We have never trained a crew for doing a spacewalk before,” she said. “We had to come up with the whole end-to-end process for how to do this.”

For the record, NASA typically has its astronauts put on test versions of its iconic puffy white EVA suits and spend time underwater in a vast purpose-built pool to prepare for the strains and trials of spacewalking.

SpaceX did things differently.

“But SpaceX was like, well, we’re not going to have suits that we can both use in space and use in the water on the timeline we’re trying to meet,” Gillis said.

So instead of taking an underwater dive, Gillis said SpaceX “created a suspension system where you can pressurize the real flight suits, or training suits, in a simulator environment.”

The suspension system “kind of simulated physics where, if you tap with your finger, your whole body moves up and down really, really easily,” she said. “So it was this really cool approach (to simulating microgravity) and how to solve a problem in a different way that meets the needs of the mission.”

In this screengrab from video, the Polaris Dawn crew is seen inside the SpaceX Dragon capsule before the spacewalk on September 12.

The Polaris Dawn crew is carrying out a total of 36 research experiments during their stay in orbit.

Some of that research is centered around dealing with the daunting biological challenges that humans face while floating in a spacecraft.

When asked by CNN, many of the crew members said they’re most excited for experiments focused on gaining a better understanding of space adaptation syndrome, a deeply uncomfortable condition known to affect about about 1 in 2 people that travel to orbit.

“I’m really, really interested to see how (being in microgravity) goes for me and what I learn and bring back to the training program at SpaceX,” Polaris Dawn crew member and SpaceX astronaut trainer Sarah Gillis told CNN.

“Human spaceflight is not going to be glamorous all the time,” Gillis added. “Humans aren’t meant to live and work without gravity.”

Gillis added that one experiment the Polaris Dawn crew will tackle involves putting on special contact lenses that have pressure transducers (or highly accurate measuring instruments) on them. The lenses will gauge how the crew members’ eyeballs are responding to pressure changes as they adapt to life swimming around in microgravity, according to Gillis.

“We call it kind of endearingly ‘the cyborg experiment,’” she said.

If any among the Polaris Dawn crew get sick in space, there is a medication that can help get them through it. But, Isaacman told CNN, it can put you to sleep for up to eight hours.

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carries the Polaris Dawn crew at 1,400 kilometers above Earth on September 11.

Now that the spacewalk has concluded, the Polaris Dawn crew will spend another couple days in orbit checking off remaining mission goals.

That includes working through the rest of their list of nearly 40 experiments.

And a surprise demonstration of SpaceX’s Starlink internet-beaming satellites being used for in-space communication is expected at some point during the mission.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft could make its return to Earth this weekend, potentially in the early hours of Sunday morning, as the Polaris Dawn crew has said they expect their trip to last about five or six days.

Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, just sent out words of congratulation to the four-person Polaris Dawn team and SpaceX:

Spacewalks are nothing new.

NASA has been carrying out the endeavors since the Gemini program debuted the capability for the United States in 1965.

Since then, astronauts from all over the world have used spacewalking technology to explore the moon’s surface, service the Hubble Space Telescope and help construct the International Space Station. Today, spacewalks are still routinely used at the ISS to allow astronauts to service and maintain the exterior of the aging laboratory.

But what SpaceX did was today was take a major step toward commercializing those capabilities — making spacewalks a task that can be carried out by the private sector, not just government astronauts.

Never before has a crew made up entirely of private citizens outside the purview of a government space program completed such an endeavor.

To be clear, SpaceX’s spacesuits are still in the early days of development. And today’s spacewalk was just a test.

But the underlying ethos of SpaceX is to commercialize space travel and radically reduce costs, in the hope that those efforts lead to a future in which people can afford to live and work in space.

And NASA, for the record, is supportive of this shift toward privatization. For years, the space agency has embraced efforts to “commercialize” and spawned new efforts to bolster private industry to take on tasks that NASA otherwise may have done itself in the past.

That’s a wrap on this historic spacewalk. The Crew Dragon capsule has returned to a normal pressure, mimicking inside the cabin what the atmosphere feels like on some parts of Earth.

Nitrox — or a mix of nitrogen and oxygen — flowed through the astronauts’ suits, purging out pure oxygen that had been there.

And now the crew can now begin getting out of their EVA suits, bringing today’s endeavor to its formal conclusion.

Crew inside the capsule.

The crews are focused on their in-helmet displays and wrapping up the spacewalk right now. But from inside the cabin, the group can catch mind-blowing views of Earth whisking by below.

On Wednesday, Anna Mennon noted during a dispatch to Earth that the Polaris Dawn crew can see a sunrise and sunset about every 106 minutes.

“It is honestly one of my favorite views,” she said. “The sun peaks over the horizon and the whole world just lights up — or the whole world goes to sleep. And you just get to witness this hour after hour, and it’s so beautiful. Our Earth is so beautiful.”?

Right now, the Crew Dragon capsule is repressurizing, or bringing itself back to a pressure equal to that the crew has inside their spacesuits.

“Teams will raise the cabin pressure up to 8 psi, pause, let the atmosphere equalize, and perform a cabin leak check prior to resuming repress all the way up to 14 psi,” according to a post from SpaceX. “The entire process may take up to 50 minutes.”

That will pave the way for the crew to remove their spacesuits and officially conclude today’s event.

Sarah Gillis during first commercial spacewalk.

The Polaris Dawn crew was asked exactly that during a livestream with childhood cancer patients on Wednesday.

And the answer is, it depends, according to SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, who just returned to her seat after completing her leg of today’s spacewalk.

“When we’re outside in space, you’re going to have really big temperature extremes, because you’re either in the sun or you’re in the shade, and so we’ll experience up to plus or minus 250 degrees,” Gillis said.

The crew is once again sealed off from the endless void outside their Crew Dragon spacecraft.

The company confirmed that Gillis was able to securely latch and close the hatch after re-entering the spacecraft.

Now, the cabin is beginning to repressurize.

Astronaut Ed White floats in the zero gravity of space outside the Gemini IV spacecraft, on June 3, 1965.

Apart from surviving the harsh vacuum of outer space protected only by pressurized suits covering the astronauts’ bodies, the crew has to worry about a key final milestone to conclude today’s spacewalk: Closing the spacecraft’s hatch.

This could be one of the most difficult parts of the mission.

Differences in pressure inside and outside the Crew Dragon capsule can make shutting that door very difficult.

Crews on some of NASA’s earliest missions had such troubles. During the Gemini program, some missions to orbit were carried out that were somewhat similar to Polaris Dawn, with astronauts exiting their capsules to perform spacewalks before hunkering back inside.

During 1965’s historic Gemini 4 mission, which saw NASA astronaut Ed White become the first American to walk in space, for example, the crew had trouble closing the hatch afterward.

It was “probably the hairiest thing that happened to me in space,” said White’s Gemini 4 flight partner, astronaut James McDivitt, in 1999. “When we went to close the hatch, it wouldn’t close. It wouldn’t lock. And so, in the dark I was trying to fiddle around over on the side where I couldn’t see anything, trying to get my glove down in this little slot to push the gears together. And finally, we got that done and got it latched.”

After spending about 10 minutes outside the vehicle, Sarah Gillis is heading back to her seat before SpaceX begins wrapping up the event.

Gillis spent her time outside wiggling around in her spacesuit — as expected — to help test out its mobility.

Developing spacesuits that fit and function more like normal clothes than the highly restrictive and puffy white suits that have been used during spacewalks of the past is a key goal for SpaceX.

The company considers Polaris Dawn to be a jumping off point for that development. That’s why Isaacman and Gillis focused so much on assessing their mobility limits while suited up.

Sarah Gillis exits the Crew Dragon.

Sarah Gillis, one of two SpaceX employees on this mission, is following Jared Isaacman’s foray outside the spacecraft.

She just climbed out the “Skywalker” ladder at the top of the capsule and caught her first glimpse of the deep, black expanse.

Part of the seals that sit around the Crew Dragon hatch are bulging out a bit.

That’s not unexpected, said Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer, during the livestream.

Sarah Gillis took a quick break to make sure that seal popped back in.

Now, she’s preparing to exit the spacecraft.

Some of the thrusters that keep the Crew Dragon oriented while in space are located on the same end of the spacecraft where Jared Isaacman just poked his head out.

That meant that SpaceX couldn’t fire any of those jets to keep the spacecraft in precision orbit. So right now, the vehicle is doing some tiny adjustments to get in perfect alignment before crew member Sarah Gillis heads for the exit.

Jared Isaacman spent just over 10 minutes outside the capsule and is now returning to his seat, preparing to make way for Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer and mission specialist for the Polaris Dawn crew.

Both Isaacman and Gillis were previously designated to be the crew members that would step outside the vehicle. Scott Poteet and Anna Mennon remain inside.

Jared Isaacman outside the capsule.

Jared Isaacman is doing some expected bending around — a sort of dance in the vacuum of space.

That’s meant to test out how SpaceX’s new spacewalking suits move.

Meanwhile, outside the Crew Dragon capsule from the waist up, he can soak in stunning views of Earth passing by 730 kilometers below.

Jared Isaacman shares his first dispatch while peering out from the Crew Dragon capsule.

Jared Isaacman just shared his first dispatch while peering out from the Crew Dragon capsule: “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here — looks like a perfect world,” he said.

SpaceX just shared the first views from Jared Isaacman’s helmet — and he’s now exiting the vehicle, moving to the “skywalker” ladder as he prepares to poke his head out the top and into the vacuum of space.

The hatch is open.

Jared Isaacman, the Polaris Dawn mission commander, just unlatched the Crew Dragon hatch. Then it took a couple tries — and more than a few awkward horizontal tugs —?to open the door.

Some of the action took place off camera, as the crew is currently going through an expected blackout period for their video feed.

Jared Isaacman prepares to open the hatch.

It’s time for the big show.

Jared Isaacman was just given the go-ahead to begin prying open the Crew Dragon hatch, opening the doorway to space from their small 13-foot-wide capsule.

For this mission, SpaceX installed a large set of handrails inside the Crew Dragon cabin as well as a special ladder — nicknamed “Skywalker” — at the top of the capsule.

The reason?

In microgravity, it’s not always easy to get a grip. Soon, Jared Isaacman will try to open the hatch, and he’ll have to use plenty of force to get it to budge. But if he didn’t have footholds and other places to get his purchase, he’d just keep floating away.

That’s one lesson the company learned from old NASA missions, SpaceX’s webcast host Dan Huot said.

“We’re going into this with a whole lot more information than they had back then (under NASA’s Gemini program in the 1960s). We know you need handrails,” he said.

Cabin venting begins on board the Crew Dragon capsule.

The four-person Polaris Dawn team just gave the go-ahead to move on to the next step of the spacewalk: Venting the cabin.

The process should take about eight minutes, according to SpaceX’s Dan Huot.

This will bring the pressure inside the spacecraft down to vacuum, matching the endless expanse on the other side of the hatch door.

SpaceX just shared live views from inside the Crew Dragon capsule as the crew prepares to unlock the hatch — but now they’re gone.

That’s expected.

Though SpaceX is testing out using Starlink internet for in-space communications, they aren’t using the system for this spacewalk. And occasional outages are to be expected as the capsule is whisking through Earth’s orbit at more than 17,000 miles per hour —?occasionally passing regions out of reach of ground stations of NASA’s TDRS satellites, which Polaris Dawn is relying on for relaying data.

“Since we are not using Starlink to enable views today, there will be moments of expected loss of signal due to ground station coverage,” Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer, noted earlier in the webcast. “So those views may be interrupted from time to time, but generally, we expect to get some great shots today.”

The Polaris Dawn crew just switched on a couple valves aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft that began the flow of pure oxygen to their spacesuits.

But there are actually two different lines of oxygen — or O2?— at play here.

The first, according to SpaceX’s Dan Huot, is “Primary O2.” That’s used as the main source of air for breathing.

The second is “Secondary O2,” which is used to help with cooling the suits.

One of the next steps is suit pressurization. After that, the crew will check to make sure there are no leaks.

The leak check is “extremely important part of the whole process,” said NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins. “You want to make sure that your suit is maintaining the pressure that it needs to.”

The crew are undergoing a "suit purge" as the spacewalk begins on September 12.

The official kickoff of today’s spacewalk has arrived.

No one has exited the vehicle yet, and the spacecraft’s hatch is still fastened closed. But SpaceX considers the official start of this event to be when the astronauts undergo a “suit purge.”

“Pure oxygen is going to start flowing to the crew suits,” said SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot. “That’s when the EVA clock will start.”

It will be another half-hour before the crew begins to open the Crew Dragon spacecraft’s door and Jared Isaacman exits the vehicle.

Mission controllers just gave the final thumbs-up to kick off the big event.

The crew will move forward with the spacewalk, preparing to spend the next couple of hours exposed to the vacuum of space.

Crew prepare inside the Polaris cabin on September 12.

SpaceX just shared an initial look inside the Crew Dragon capsule since the crew finished putting on their EVA suits ahead of the spacewalk.

Scott “Kidd” Poteet can be seen in his seat in the background while mission commander Jared Isaacman is floating with what appears to be an umbilical nearby, his head pointed toward the hatch.

The Polaris Dawn crew.

SpaceX has a fairly detailed timeline of what to expect in the minutes and hours after the Crew Dragon capsule opens its hatch, and the Polaris Dawn spacewalk actually begins.

The outline also uses some shorthand for the various crew members. Here’s a quick breakdown of this code:

EV1: Jared Isaacman, the Polaris Dawn mission commander who also helped conceive of and fund this mission. Isaacman also goes by his callsign “Rook.” He’ll be the first to exit the spacecraft.

EV2: SpaceX engineer and mission specialist of this flight, Sarah Gillis. She’ll exit the vehicle after Isaacman returns from his roughly 12-minute stay outside the capsule. Gillis’ call sign is “Cooper.”

Support-1: Scott Poteet, Isaacman’s longtime friend and a former Air Force pilot. His callsign is “Kidd.”

Support-2: Anna Menon, a SpaceX engineer and a mission specialist and medical officer for Polaris Dawn. She goes by the callsign “Walker.”

The SpaceX Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suit.

When it comes to spaceflight — “affordability” is all relative.

The spacewalk suits that are used by government astronauts on the International Space Station, for example, are bespoke garments that NASA has now spent billions of dollars over more than a decade trying to replace.

It’s not clear how much money SpaceX and Jared Issacman — a Polaris Dawn crew member and partial funder of this mission — spent designing and developing the new extravehicular activity (EVA) suits.

When discussing the vision for the EVA suits in an interview with CNN, Isaacman brought up the big picture goal: To one day have entire settlements of people living in space.

Isaacman said he discussed that grand vision with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, and they agreed: “We need space suits. And, you know, they shouldn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars. We need tens of thousands of them someday.”

For the record, however, SpaceX’s EVA suits can’t be a one-for-one replacement for the NASA suits on board the International Space Station – or the suits that the space agency is trying to develop for astronauts to use on the surface of the moon.

The SpaceX suits do not include a Primary Life Support System, or PLSS, which is essentially a backpack that allows ISS astronauts to float more freely through space to carry out complex tasks, such as repairing and replacing hardware outside the space station, according to Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who serves as a SpaceX consultant and helped lead the development of Crew Dragon.

Instead, the Polaris Dawn crew will receive their life support from long hoses attached to their spacecraft.

Part of what makes Polaris Dawn such a remarkable endeavor is the fact that it’s completely private.

SpaceX funded this mission alongside Jared Isaacman (who did not, when asked by CNN in August, say how much it cost).

Meanwhile, NASA took a back seat — but that doesn’t mean the space agency wasn’t involved.

Menon said NASA carried out reviews of all of the mission’s plans and hardware.

“We had advisors — technical advisors from NASA — come in, listen for full days, and really give feedback, give pointers,” Menon said.

The crew also used NASA facilities to carry out some testing, including giant chambers that allowed them to test out their suits in a vacuum environment.

NASA has also shared some well-wishes to the crew on social media, including this post from the space agency’s official account for the Artemis Program, which aims to return astronauts to the surface of the moon — landing on board a SpaceX Starship spacecraft.

Technically, preparations for this spacewalk started almost immediately after the Polaris Dawn crew reached orbit. That’s when the Crew Dragon capsule started raising oxygen levels to prepare the crew members’ bodies for the spacewalk.

But today has included a checklist of some additional, practical steps, according to Kate Tice, a senior SpaceX engineer.

“So far, the crew has prepared the cabin for vacuum, which includes securing all loose items that they don’t want floating around,” she said. “They also completed medical checks, suit inspections and final checkouts of the oxygen venting and nitrogen repressurization systems.”

All that had to get done before the team began putting on their EVA suits.

This historic spacewalk may be kicking into high gear right now, but the four-person Polaris Dawn crew has been preparing for this moment practically since they launched two days ago.

Almost immediately after reaching orbit, Isaacman, Gillis, Menon and Poteet began a “pre-breathe” process to prepare for the spacewalk.

The pre-breathe process aims to avoid decompression sickness — the same dangerous and potentially fatal illness that scuba divers may face if they attempt to surface too quickly, otherwise known as “the bends.”

During the pre-breathe, astronauts purge nitrogen?from their blood so that when the Dragon capsule is depressurized and exposed to the vacuum of space, the gas doesn’t form bubbles in their bloodstream.

Indeed, the pre-breathe protocol the Polaris Dawn crew is undergoing is entirely unlike what is carried out on the International Space Station.

The space station has special airlocks where astronauts can undergo a rapid pre-breathing process before beginning their spacewalks. It takes only a couple of hours.

The Polaris Dawn crew’s pre-breathe routine, however, took about 45 hours, according to Gillis’ prior comments, during which the oxygen content in the Crew Dragon spacecraft cabin slowly increased while the pressure decreased.

“What is really cool about this (pre-breathing) profile is it actually, in many ways, is much less risky than what the standard is on the space station,” Gillis said. “It’s like opening a can of soda pop?— and you want to open the can (and have) none of the bubbles to come out because the pressure outside of the can is equal to what’s inside.”

By lowering the pressure inside Crew Dragon, Gillis added, and putting on their spacesuits just as the ambient pressure equals the suit pressure — the crew members can better mitigate any risk of unwanted bubbles.

The SpaceX livestream is rolling, delivering updates on the status of the Polaris Dawn crew.

The hosts just shared the four crew members are putting on their extravehicular activity (EVA) suits at the moment.

Unlike most missions that include a spacewalk, the Polaris Dawn crew does not have two sets of suits — one for wearing inside their spacecraft during launch and splashdown and another to put on for spacewalking.

SpaceX has packaged both into one. So right now, the crew members are putting back on the same spacesuits they wore two days ago for launch.

They were allowed to take off the suits in the meantime, helping to keep them comfortable.

Anna Menon reads a book from space on September 11.

Earlier on Wednesday, Polaris Dawn crew member Anna Menon —?a SpaceX engineer and the medical officer for this mission — took time to make a phone call to home, reading a children’s book she authored to her own young children as well as some lucky listeners from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

The whole thing was hosted by US Olympian Shawn Johnson East.

Menon floated in space — hair splayed out by the lack of gravity — as she read from “Kisses from Space,” which is about a dragon (perhaps a nod to the Crew Dragon spacecraft) that leaves her family behind to venture into orbit.

Also present for the reading was Menon’s husband, NASA astronaut Anil Menon, who was listening in back on Earth with their kids.

The Polaris crew in space on September 12.

After a two-and-a-half-hour delay, SpaceX is kicking off its live coverage of the spacewalk.

The company is live streaming the event on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk purchased in 2022.

The stream is expected to deliver live views from space as the Polaris Dawn crew begins their historic and risky spacewalk.

It’s a busy time in Earth’s orbit —?busier, in fact, than ever before.

Just yesterday, as a Russian Soyuz spacecraft launched a three-person crew to the International Space Station, humanity broke its all-time record for the most people in orbit at the same time, NASA confirmed during a webcast of the event. There are currently 19 people on missions in Earth’s orbit.

They include:

Four Polaris Dawn crew members: Billionaire Jared Isaacman, former Air Force pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, and two SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis

Seven staff members aboard the ISS: NASA’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps and Tracy Caldwell Dyson, as well as Nikolai Chub, Oleg Kononenko and Alexander Grebenkin of Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos

Three taikonauts aboard China’s Tiangong space station: Li Guangsu, Li Cong and Ye Guangfu

Two test pilots that led the Boeing Starliner flight to the ISS: NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams

And the three-person crew of the Soyuz mission who just arrived at the ISS for a crew swap: NASA’s Don Pettit and Roscosmos’ Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner

To be clear: More people have been in space at the same time before — but not in orbit.

For a few minutes on January 26, 2024, for example, there were a total of 20 people in space, but that count included six people on board a suborbital Virgin Galactic space tourism flight.

The 870-mile peak altitude reached by the mission was high enough to plunge the Polaris Dawn crew into the inner band of Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts, which begin at around 600 miles (1,000 kilometers)?in altitude.?

The belts are areas where concentrations of high-energy particles that come from the sun and interact with Earth’s atmosphere are trapped, creating two dangerous bands of radiation, according to?NASA. Before the Apollo program, the global space community had no idea whether humans could survive passing through this area at all.

The International Space Station orbits about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope, which NASA astronauts have conducted spacewalks to repair, orbits about 320 miles (515 kilometers) high. The innermost of two bands that make up the Van Allen radiation belts begins at about 600 miles (1,000 kilometers). The Polaris Dawn mission will reach a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) before lowering its apogee for the spacewalk.

Today’s spacewalk, however, will occur at a slightly lower altitude —?traveling between 190 and 700 kilometers above Earth (118 to 435 miles).

For context, humans commonly visit the International Space Station at about 400 kilometers (250 miles), and astronauts have previously conducted spacewalks at about 515 kilometers (320 miles), where the Hubble Space Telescope orbits.

Anna Menon attends a Polaris Dawn mission overview briefing at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2024.

Anna Menon was “completely surprised” when Jared Isaacman told her she’d be part of the Polaris Dawn crew in 2021.

“Absolutely never would have seen this coming in my entire life,” she told CNN in August.

But as a lifelong space enthusiast, she always hoped she’d have a shot at extraterrestrial adventure.

Menon has a master’s degree in biomedical engineering from Duke University and she put in a seven-year stint at NASA, working as a biomedical flight controller for the International Space Station.

After switching to a role at SpaceX, she served in mission control during some of the company’s highest-profile missions, including 2020’s Demo-2 — the inaugural crewed flight of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule that returned astronaut launches to US soil for the first time in a decade.

Her expertise is a key reason Isaacman brought her on to this high-stakes mission.

Notably, her husband —?Anil Menon — was selected as a NASA astronaut mere days before Anna learned she would join Inspiration 4. (Anil has not been assigned to his first mission.)

Menon will serve as the Polaris Dawn mission’s medical officer.

If?space adaptation syndrome?— a type of severe motion sickness that can strike astronauts — hits the crew, it will be up to Menon to administer medication to alleviate those symptoms.

Sarah Gillis attends a Polaris Dawn mission overview briefing at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2024.

Sarah Gillis was shocked to learn about possible space travel during a meeting that popped up on her calendar in late 2021.

As a lead operations engineer at SpaceX, Gillis has taken the reins on training astronauts for crucial missions. Among her trainees were the first astronauts to fly in a Crew Dragon capsule — NASA’s Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley — before the?historic Demo-2 mission in 2020.

She also trained Jared Isaacman for his first mission to space: 2021’s Inspiration4 mission.

During Gillis’ career at SpaceX, where she has worked for nearly a decade, Gillis has also helped develop the company’s Crew Dragon operations process and has been close to the sidelines of human spaceflight.

Now, she said, “I’m really, really interested to see how (being in microgravity) goes for me and what I learn and bring back to the training program at SpaceX.”

Ironically, Gillis did not grow up dreaming of cosmic adventures. She’s a trained violinist who did not seriously consider a career in space until her junior year of high school, when she met?NASA astronaut Joe Tanner. He helped her with a senior project and encouraged her to pursue engineering in college.

Gillis and Menon have spent the past several years splitting time between their day jobs at SpaceX — leaving their fingerprints on the hardware that will carry them to space — and training for the Polaris Dawn mission.

“Now, I would say, over the last couple of months, we’ve transitioned to full-time crew members,” Gillis added.

Scott Poteet attends a Polaris Dawn mission overview briefing at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2024.

Scott “Kidd” Poteet has been along for the ride throughout Jared Isaacman’s pursuit of space ambitions.

Their friendship stems from experiences in the air: Poteet spent 20 years in the Air Force, racking up about 3,200 hours of jet flight experience. And Isaacman is a passionate pilot with thousands of hours of experience flying jets and experimental aircraft.

Poteet went to work for Isaacman at?Draken International — a tactical fighter aircraft supplier and contractor for the US military — after meeting him at an air show.

That experiencelasted about five years, Poteet said, before Isaacman sold the company. And now, Poteet supports Issacman’s latest spaceflight endeavors — and he’s shocked to be doing so, he told CNN.

“I was not the best academic student growing up — grade school through high school,” Poteet said. “But I admired all the astronauts and the NASA programs: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo leading up to the shuttle era.”

But as a former operational test pilot, Poteet has some of the career chops that professional NASA astronauts do. And he said he fully supports the vision of Isaacman and SpaceX: A future in which humanity lives among the stars.

“I was a firm believer,” Poteet said.

Poteet said this mission shows what the SpaceX team can “accomplish in a very short few years (and) is a true testament to its professionalism.”

“I have absolutely zero reservations,” Poteet said about making this foray into space. “I have full faith and confidence that they’ve crossed every ‘T’ and dotted every ‘I’ in preparation for our mission.”

SpaceX just announced that the spacewalk won’t kick off just before 2:30 a.m. ET as expected. Instead, this historic event will kick off no earlier than 5:58 a.m. ET.

A webcast for the event is expected to begin about an hour prior.

The company did not share a reason for the schedule adjustment, though SpaceX notes that the pressure inside the Crew Dragon capsule will be changing leading up to the time that the crew opens the hatch.

The pressure inside the capsule must be slowly altered as part of the “pre-breathing” process that prepares the astronauts’ bodies to be exposed to the vacuum of space.

From left: Anna Menon, Scott Poteet, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis of the Polaris Dawn crew at Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in August 2024.

As one of the instigators of the Polaris Dawn mission, Jared Isaacman had a hand in selecting the crewmates who would travel alongside him. And this team is distinct from the one that accompanied Isaacman on the Inspiration4 mission — his first foray into space —nearly three years ago.

Inspiration 4 brought along people from all walks of life. And the four-member crew spent three days in space, lapping planet Earth, with no frills or significant added risk to the mission. (The Crew Dragon capsule has made about a dozen crewed trips to space, most of which docked with the International Space Station.)

But due to the experimental nature and risks associated with Polaris Dawn — including the high altitude, radiation exposure, and an experimental spacewalk — Isaacman said this mission required a different approach.

“But Polaris is a test and developmental program — and that appeals to my aviation background and things we’ve done in the past,” he added. “It’s set out (to) have ambitious objectives. So, you assemble the best crew you could for it.”

Rounding at the Polaris Dawn crew are Isaacman’s close friend and former Air Force pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, as well as two SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis — each of whom has trained and worked with NASA and commercial astronauts.

SpaceX's Polaris Dawn Falcon 9 rocket blasts off from Launch Complex 39A of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 10

Polaris Dawn — a bold and risky trek into?Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts?by a four-person crew of civilians who will also aim to conduct the first commercial spacewalk — took flight at 5:23 a.m. ET Tuesday.

The launch came after several weather delays in late August and earlier in the morning on Tuesday hampered the Polaris Dawn crew’s?efforts to get off the ground.

Further complicating launch prospects was the fact that SpaceX didn’t just need clear weather for the mission to take off — it needed to ensure there are calm waters and winds as the crew will return from space after a five-day excursion. Timing their return could be critical. Because carrying out a spacewalk will create a drain on oxygen supplies, the Polaris Dawn mission will have only enough life support for five or six days in space.

As the capsule entered Earth’s orbit, ground controllers, led by SpaceX launch director Frank Messina, offered words of encouragement to the Polaris Dawn crew, which includes the first SpaceX employees ever to venture to space.

Inspiration4 mission commander Jared Isaacman stands for a portrait in front of a Falcon 9 rocket at SpaceX facilities in Hawthorne, California, in February 2021.

Jared Isaaacman is the billionaire CEO of payments technology company Shift4 — but he’s also a dedicated jet pilot and space enthusiast.

He began his foray into spaceflight — and a partnership with SpaceX — back in 2021 with the liftoff of Inspiration4, a three-day trip to orbit with a cancer survivor, a data engineer who got his ticket from a raffle and an artist.

The mission was meant to demonstrate that people from all walks of life can train for and execute a mission to orbit.

But after that, Isaacman was inspired to pursue bolder feats in space.

Isaacman told CNN this passion partly stems from SpaceX’s founding mission: To make humans a multiplanetary species, as CEO Elon Musk puts it, paving the way for a future in which people live and work on Mars or other foreign planets.

The summer before Inspiration4 took off, Isaacman said he visited SpaceX’s facilities in South Texas. That’s the site of testing and launch operations for the company’s Starship rocket — the largest launch vehicle ever created, which Musk bills as the vehicle that will land humans on Mars for the first time.

That’s why, Isaacman said, he worked with Musk and engineers at SpaceX to build the Polaris Program. Polaris Dawn is the first mission under that umbrella, with at least two more ventures to space planned for later down the road.

The Polaris Program’s goal is to develop and test technologies that SpaceX would need if it established an extraterrestrial settlement.

Polaris Dawn and Dragon pictured at 1,400 km above Earth – the farthest humans have traveled since the Apollo program over 50 years ago.

On Tuesday evening, around 9 p.m. ET, SpaceX confirmed?that Polaris Dawn had reached its peak altitude of 1,400.7 kilometers (870 miles.)

That distance surpassed the record set by NASA’s 1966 Gemini 11 mission, which reached?853 miles?(1,373 kilometers) during its trek around Earth.

NASA’s Apollo missions traveled farther but did not enter a traditional orbit around Earth. They were destined for the moon, which lies a quarter million miles away from our planet. The Polaris Dawn mission also marks the farthest any human has journeyed since the final Apollo mission in 1972 — and the farthest into space a woman has ever traveled.

An illustration shows a scene from the Polaris Dawn mission spacewalk.

Polaris Dawn’s four-person crew is preparing to make a monumental step: Opening the hatch of their 13-foot-wide SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and exposing themselves and their cabin to the vacuum of space.

The team is expected to open the door as soon as 2:23 a.m. ET, though timing can always change based on how things are progressing.

The spacewalk — or the time the crew spends in vacuum — is expected to last a total of two hours.

Two crew members, Isaacman and Gillis, will exit the vehicle for about 20 minutes within that 2-hour window. And the goal during that time is to test out the crew’s Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suits, which were designed and developed by SpaceX specifically for this mission over the past two and a half years.

“When we’re out there, we’re going to make use of various mobility aids the SpaceX team has engineered,” Isaacman said during an August 21 news briefing.