Spaceflight Is Entering Its Cowboy Era
6 min read
Early this morning, four private astronauts blasted into orbit to carry out SpaceX’s most dangerous mission yet. After a few days of circling Earth, the passengers will suit up and open the hatch of their spaceship. All of the precious, breathable air inside their capsule will escape into the cold void. Two of them will venture out, gripping an exterior ladder with their gloved hands as they dangle over the planet. All four will be exposed to the vacuum of space, and they will rely on their spacesuits, which SpaceX has never tested in space before, to keep them alive. It will be the first civilian spacewalk in history—and perhaps the riskiest spacewalk in decades.
The mission, known as Polaris Dawn, is a throwback to the early days of American spaceflight. Before NASA developed airlock technology—the small compartment that separates the livable environment within a spaceship from the inhospitable one without—the country’s space capsules subjected the whole crew to the vacuum during spacewalks. SpaceX is returning to the older style because a private citizen, the billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman, wants to do a spacewalk. Since Isaacman is funding the mission, the company has an incentive to cater to his space dreams, however wild. But SpaceX also has a history of moving fast and breaking things to achieve its own ambitious goals and, given customers with attitudes to match, is racking up firsts in private spaceflight. The company could start looking less like it’s replaying NASA’s greatest hits and more like it’s lapping the venerated space agency—as long as its passengers make it back home.
Isaacman previously chartered a SpaceX mission in 2021, the first orbital trip without government astronauts. In 2022, he commissioned SpaceX for three more, essentially starting his own private spaceflight program guided by a lifelong interest in space exploration and a penchant for high-flying firsts: As a young pilot, Isaacman broke a speed record for flying around the world. Isaacman and the rest of the crew—two SpaceX employees and one of his longtime friends, a retired Air Force pilot—have trained extensively for the journey, including simulating the emptying and refilling of air in SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. But even among the most prepared professional astronauts, “there’s unknowable levels of anxiety in first-time spacewalkers, and this uncertainty applies to the whole crew, when there’s no airlock,” Kenneth “Taco” Cockrell, a retired NASA shuttle astronaut, told me. Even if spacewalkers are cool as cucumbers, time and breathable air are both finite during a spacewalk, and serious malfunctions in their suits, ship, or life-support systems could be deadly.
Isaacman is aware of the potential dangers, but seems largely unbothered by them. “It is not without risk, and you’re taking that risk because you want to advance the ball forward, things that help SpaceX open up this frontier for everyone,” Isaacman told CBS News in a recent interview. Someone was eventually going to perform the first private spacewalk, so why not now, and why not him?
In pictures of the first American spacewalk, from 1965, NASA astronaut Ed White looks like the epitome of a space cowboy, hovering unsupported over Earth, the tether attaching him to the Gemini capsule floating in front of him like a lasso. What the image doesn’t capture is how harrowing White’s experience was. White and the other astronaut on the mission, James McDivitt, struggled with nearly every aspect of the walk: opening the hatch, wrangling the tangle of cords once White was back inside, closing the hatch. Later, on Earth, White described the final 30-second battle with the door as “probably the most dramatic moment of my life.” Both astronauts “were near exhausted,” Carroll “Pete” Woodling, the NASA chief for crew safety and procedures at the time, recalled in an interview in 2000. NASA would have lost both men if they hadn’t managed to seal that door. A year later, Gene Cernan found it nearly impossible to move around when his spacesuit stiffened in the vacuum of space. On top of that, the early space capsules lacked handholds and footholds on the outside, which made maneuvering around extremely strenuous. When Cernan was finally back in, the space historian Michael Neufeld has written, “he looked as red as a boiled lobster.”
Polaris Dawn seems even more hair-raising when you consider that the Dragon wasn’t designed for spacewalks. Yes, it has ferried plenty of astronauts to and from the International Space Station in recent years, but those passengers have always remained cozily enclosed inside the vehicle until it docked with the ISS. Dragon has no airlock, and SpaceX engineers have had to modify the capsule for this mission, including boosting its oxygen reserves so all four suits have enough air to last through the entire two-hour event.
According to Isaacman, Polaris Dawn has incorporated some crucial improvements on the old-fashioned spacewalks. He and his fellow spacewalker, Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX astronaut trainer, will keep their feet on the ladder. The Dragon spacecraft bears a motorized system to help the astronauts handle the hatch. And compared with what White and Cernan wore, the SpaceX suit is a garment of science fiction, sleek and tight-fitting, with a helmet that displays the performance stats of the suit to the wearer. Hopefully they will not transform into, as Cernan described his own outfit, “a rusty suit of armor” in the vacuum of space. Polaris Dawn is a first-of-its-kind experiment, though, and these features don’t guarantee an easy spacewalk—nothing can.
Commercial spaceflight was always going to introduce new shades of risk to leaving Earth. If the Polaris attempt goes wrong, it will become one more entry in the perpetually growing catalog of wealthy individuals choosing the wrong extreme adventure. If it succeeds, then SpaceX gets to market spacewalks to everyone. And, with the help of its most loyal customer, it will further cement its status as the preeminent space company in America. A successful demonstration of SpaceX’s extravehicular-activity suits could put the company ahead of even NASA. The spacesuits that NASA uses on the International Space Station are more than 40 years old and regularly give astronauts trouble. Just this summer, NASA called off a spacewalk before the astronauts even left the ISS’s airlock when Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit sprung a water leak. NASA has also struggled to develop suits for its future moonwalkers, who are supposed to land on the lunar surface before the end of the decade—never mind outfits that could help extend human presence even deeper into the solar system. If SpaceX’s designs prove themselves up to this challenge, the company will have the most desirable suits in the business.
SpaceX’s influence on America’s spacefaring agenda grows stronger each year, setting the example—and providing the technology—for what the country might be capable of in this century. The same may soon be true of SpaceX’s customers. Isaacman has offered to use the mission after Polaris Dawn to raise the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope, which sinks a little closer to Earth each year, in order to extend its lifespan—an operation that would involve spacewalking. NASA hasn’t taken up Isaacman on the offer yet, but if it does, the agency will cede one more unit of power to the commercial space sector, and to a single wealthy American with visions of grandeur.
In the coming years, SpaceX customers may dream of using Dragon to clean up space junk, or to refuel a space telescope that has run out of gas, or to simply float untethered from a spacecraft because Bruce McCandless looked cool doing it in 1988. SpaceX likes to portray itself as a mission-driven company, whose employees are bought into its ultimate dream, but it is still a company, where customers will be able to pay handsomely for the chance to risk their lives. What Isaacman is pulling isn’t just a stunt, but it has some elements of one: the risk, the questionable rationale, the bid for personal glory. He’s inaugurating a true cowboy era in spaceflight. Now, the daring astronauts aren’t employees spacewalking for the glory of their country and planet, but customers buying into danger for their own reasons—and still steering the course of our cosmic future.
