Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman became the first private citizen in history to perform a spacewalk early Thursday morning, following humanity's farthest journey from Earth since the Apollo moon missions.
Footage of the daring stunt shows 41-year-old Isaacman 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 said shortly after emerging from the spacecraft with the planet shining below.
About 15 minutes later, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis replaced Isaacman and followed suit with two other crew members, engineer Anna Menon and former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot Scott Kidd-Poteet.
Their actions were streamed live on the SpaceX website.
The spacewalk was scheduled to last approximately 30 minutes, but preparation and procedures for its safe completion were expected to take about two hours.
Isaacman and three other crew members were seen waiting inside the capsule until it was fully depressurized before opening the hatch to exit.
This comes after SpaceX suddenly delayed the scheduled start of the spacewalk by several hours. No reason for the delay was immediately given, but the company said through X that “all systems appear to be on track.”
Isaacman and his three-person crew began preparations for the endeavor shortly after they were launched into orbit on Tuesday for a five-day flight.
New SpaceX spacesuits, which he helped design, kept them safe during the two-hour mission.
Authorities had said Isaacman, the billionaire CEO and founder of credit-card processing company Shift4, would remain restrained and with at least one hand or foot on the spacecraft to ensure his safety.
Currently, only NASA's spacesuits are equipped with jetpacks that can whisk astronauts to safety, making longer, untethered spacewalks impossible.
Because Crew Dragon does not have a pressurized airlock, all crew members were required to wear new spacesuits to protect themselves from the vacuum of space during the mission.
Joining Isaacman on the mission were SpaceX engineers Sarah Gilles and Anna Menon, and former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot Scott Kidd-Poteet.
Gilles was scheduled to join Isaacman on a spacewalk, something previously reserved for professional astronauts.
The spacewalk came after Isaacman and his crew reached an altitude of about 870 miles above Earth — far higher than the International Space Station and surpassing the previous record for orbiting Earth set by NASA's Gemini program in 1966.
The only people who have traveled further into space were the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the Moon.
While the trip would normally be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, it's just the first of three trips Isaacman has purchased from Elon Musk in 2022.
Isaacman didn't disclose how much his SpaceX trip cost, but he was part of the first group of tourists to fly into space in 2021.
On that trip, Isaacman set a record by becoming the first space tourist to orbit the Earth without a professional astronaut on board.
