It’s been a big week for space travel, after Boeing’s Starliner craft returned to Earth empty, a new record was set for the number of people in orbit and the first private space walk was a success. Now, footage of that spacewalk is online, offering you a first person view of life as a billionaire floating through space.
The Polaris Dawn mission from SpaceX went off without a hitch this week, launching astronauts Jared Isaacman, Sarah Gillis, Scott Poteet and Anna Menon into space in a modified Dragon capsule. However, this was a launch with a difference as it was all funded by a humble billionaire who had paid for the chance to be the first private citizen to walk in space.
Isaacman, who made his money leasing private planes and setting up online payment providers, funded the mission and took Gillis, a SpaceX engineer, out with him on the private space walk Thursday. Now, SpaceX has shared footage captured by Isaacman’s helmet cam to let us mere mortals see what it’s like to be a billionaire in space.
The footage, linked above, shows Isaacman clambering through the hatch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and up a ladder that takes him out of the craft. As he climbs higher, the bright shining curve of the Earth comes into view, before the camera’s exposure adjusts and the planet below becomes clear. It really is quite the site to behold.
Ground control commentates the whole thing, with a voiceover saying “I have a feeling the crowd is about to go wild,” as Isaacman peaks his head out the capsule. Right on cue, the SpaceX team erupts into applause.
Once out of the craft, Isaacman and Gillis then had a few tests to perform on their new suits, providing feedback to engineers on Earth who developed them for this mission. In the process, they also reached 869 miles above the earth, making them the farthest people to travel away from our planet since NASA’s Apollo missions 50 years ago, reports Futurism.
The privateer space walk is the latest step in the commercialization of space travel. Amazon-backed Blue Origin has been offering flights to space for the rich and famous for a little over a year now, and Richard Branson became the first person to fly near space with his Virgin Galactic enterprise.
Next, we’ll have billionaires fighting to book a stay in a new Blue Origin space station that offers them a great view of our burning planet, before Elon Musk finally colonizes Mars, which he says will happen any day now.