• Two astronauts completed the world’s first private spacewalk in orbit on September 12 outside a SpaceX capsule, wearing a new line of spacesuits.

• Led by fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman, the Polaris Dawn mission is expected to last five days.

• The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission was launched on September 10 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, journeying deeper into the cosmos than any humans in half a century, since the Apollo program.

The crew of Polaris Dawn:

• Jared Isaacman, Mission Commander

• Scott Poteet, Mission Pilot

• Sarah Gillis, Mission Specialist

• Anna Menon, Mission Specialist and Medical Officer for the program

• Isaacman is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.

• Before the spacewalk began, the capsule was completely depressurised, with the astronauts relying on their SpaceX-developed spacesuits for oxygen, provided through an umbilical connection to Crew Dragon.

• Isaacman, a pilot and the founder of electronic payments company Shift4, exited first, followed by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, while crewmates Scott Poteet and Anna Menon watched from inside.

• The astronauts went one at a time, each spending about 10 minutes outside the gumdrop-shaped Crew Dragon capsule on a tether.

• Isaacman, 41, and Gillis, 30, took turns outside the vehicle, spending a few minutes performing mobility tests on SpaceX’s next-generation suits that boast heads-up displays, helmet cameras and enhanced joint mobility systems, before returning inside.

• The whole process, unfolding about 730 km above Earth, lasted an hour and 46 minutes. 

• It was yet another major milestone for SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk in 2002.

• The spacewalk followed an audacious first phase of the mission, during which the Dragon spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 1,400 km. This put the crew more than three times higher than the International Space Station, in a region known as the inner Van Allen radiation belt — a zone filled with dangerous, high-energy particles.

• All four underwent more than two years of training in preparation for the landmark mission.

• Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.

• Only 263 people had conducted a spacewalk, representing 12 countries. The Soviet Union’s Alexei Leonov kicked it off in 1965, followed a few months later by NASA’s Ed White.

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