That's One Small Walk for a Man

Credit where credit is due, that headline is not my creation; rather it belongs to Stephen Green at PJ Media (also known as VodkaPundit), who wrote, “That's One Small Walk for a Man (and a Woman)...”  To further borrow his opening line:

The privately funded Polaris Dawn human space mission just kind of casually reached the highest orbit in more than 50 years on Wednesday and on Thursday conducted the first civilian spacewalks to just as little fanfare.

That's really the most succinct way of summing up the mission to date. To borrow the frequently used line from the old commercials, "but wait! There's more." While the first day of the mission marked the milestone of reaching the highest altitude a crew has been since the last Apollo mission crossed that altitude on the way back to Earth, the last mission to orbit at that altitude for an extended time was Gemini 11 in 1966.  That flight was crewed by Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon - both of whom have passed on. The two would fly together to the moon on Apollo 12. Pete Conrad walked on the moon while Dick Gordon had the job of  being "the loneliest man in the universe" - the Command Module pilot.

These two legends of the astronaut corps had their record broken by four young and newly minted astronauts. The experienced two were commander Jared Isaacman, billionaire tech entrepreneur, and pilot Scott Poteet, U.S. Air Force, retired. The two new astronauts on their first flight were SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon. Both Gillis and Menon are on their first flight to orbit, got that altitude record, and Sarah Gillis got to do a spacewalk on her first trip to space! Anna Menon is serving as medical officer for the flight.

Wednesday, as the Polaris Dawn capsule was slowly increasing its orbital apogee, they were also slowly and methodically having their air pressure reduced while increasing the percent oxygen. This is done to reduce the amount of nitrogen dissolved in their blood, to reduce the possibility of decompression sickness. I know they were doing other things and not just sitting there noticing their breathing, but I find no references to what they were doing.

While the walk was supposed to start earlier, 2:23 AM EDT, it didn't start until just about four hours later: 6:12 AM. The start isn't when they open the hatch, it's when they start bleeding the air out of the Dragon while doing some functional checks on their suits. I watched both of them do their spacewalks and they weren't dramatic - a good thing - but were functional tests of different aspects of the suits, while supported by specialized hatch hardware designed just for this mission and known as "Skywalker." Similarly, the EVA wasn't over when Isaacman and Gillis had completed their tests, it was declared over when the cabin had repressurized and returned to the conventional Oxygen/Nitrogen mix used.  According to SpaceX, that was 7:58 AM EDT. 

A detailed look at getting through the stages to take today's spacewalks. From SpaceX.

I've been looking for links to videos of the two spacewalks themselves, something on the order of the 10 minutes doing tests on Skywalker. There are short videos on SpaceX's page on X.  A minute and change of Isaacman's with his notable quote, "SpaceX, back at home we have a lot of work to do, but from here it looks like a perfect world." Plus a shorter one (that repeats) of Sarah Gillis' walk.  The SpaceX page on X also has a long video (3 hrs 15 minutes) that you could look around in here. 

I watched the NASASpaceflight.com coverage, which was then posted as a 3 hr 19 minute video. They don't even approach opening the hatch until almost 1 hr 54 minutes into the video (01:53:30). 

Returning to where I started, with VodkaPundit's article, I think he ends it really well, on a good note.  All props to him for this perspective.

What Polaris Dawn and other SpaceX missions remind me of is NASA's Mercury and Gemini missions of the 1960s. There were numerous technological [hurdles] to be overcome and skills to be learned before the Apollo program could take its final shape and send men to the moon.
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NASA also had to learn about known unknowns, like whether radiation in space would sicken or kill our astronauts in higher orbits. The men who performed those Mercury and Gemini missions, from Alan Shepard on Freedom 7 to Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin on Gemini 12, were pioneers in every sense of the word. What they accomplished made Apollo possible. Without them, JFK's challenge to land a man on the moon before 1970 would have been a largely forgotten speech by a dead president.

Elon Musk wants to send humans to Mars (eventually including himself), preferably beginning in 2028. SpaceX, like NASA in the '60s, has to learn many lessons before that becomes possible.

SpaceX's genius play is that Musk has figured out how to get other people to help pay for his R&D — and I don't mean your tax dollars. Polaris Dawn was funded by Isaacman. While the billionaire refuses to say how much he paid, I'd be shocked if it was anything less than $200 million, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out to be double that.
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Isaacman is getting what he wants, and SpaceX is getting the data and experience it needs to keep pushing the boundaries of human space travel.

So if anyone tells you that Polaris Dawn is just some rich man's stunt, you can tell them the truth. It was one small walk for a man and woman, and one giant leap for mankind.