By James Myers, OAN Staff
Thursday, September 12, 2024 9:14 AM
Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first private citizen to complete a spacewalk on Thursday morning, traveling the furthest from Earth since the Apollo moon missions.
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Footage of the wild stunt shows the 41-year-old man jumping on a rope from SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule just before 7am and coming face to face with the dark of space.
“We all have a lot of work to do back home, but from up here, Earth certainly looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman, founder of credit-card processing company Shift4, said after emerging from the spacecraft with Earth below.
Just 15 minutes into the spacewalk, Isaacman was replaced by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, who repeated the procedure, trailing behind the two-person crew, engineer Anna Menon and former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot Scott Kidd-Poteet.
The mission was streamed live on the SpaceX website.
The main spacewalk was scheduled to last approximately 30 minutes, but preparations and procedures to complete it safely were expected to take approximately two hours.
The footage showed Isaacman and three other crew members waiting inside the capsule until it finished depressurizing before opening the hatch and exiting.
The unusual mission came after SpaceX suddenly delayed the start of the spacewalk by several hours. No reason for the delay was immediately given, but the company said at the time that “all systems are proceeding smoothly.”
The crew began preparations for the mission as soon as they reached orbit on Tuesday for the five-day flight.
New SpaceX spacesuits, which he helped design, kept them safe during the two-hour mission.
Authorities said Isaacman remained restrained and had at least one hand or foot attached to the aircraft to ensure his safety.
But only NASA's spacesuits are equipped with jetpacks that can whisk astronauts to safety, meaning longer, untethered spacewalks were not possible.
Because Crew Dragon does not have a pressurized airlock, all crew members had to wear new spacesuits to protect themselves from the vacuum of space during the mission.
The spacewalk came after Isaacman and his crew reached an altitude of about 870 miles above Earth, surpassing the International Space Station and beating the record for orbiting Earth set in 1966 during NASA's Gemini program.
Only 24 Apollo astronauts have traveled further into space.
This will be the first of three space trips for Isaacman, who purchased it from Elon Musk in 2022.
Additionally, Isaacman was part of the first group of tourists to fly into space in 2021.
During his 2021 trip, Isaacman set a record by becoming the first space tourist to orbit Earth without a professional astronaut on board.
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