On September 12, 2024, Jared Isaacman stepped out of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft at roughly 700 kilometers above Earth and became the first private citizen to conduct an extravehicular activity. A few minutes later, SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis did the same. Neither was a trained NASA astronaut. Both were wearing newly designed SpaceX spacesuits that had never been tested outside a spacecraft before.
The Polaris Dawn mission raised the bar for what private spaceflight can accomplish.
The orbit
Before the spacewalk, the mission had already set a record. Polaris Dawn reached an apogee of 1,400 kilometers, the highest any human has traveled since the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. At that altitude, the Dragon capsule passed through the inner Van Allen radiation belt, exposing the crew to higher radiation doses than any astronaut has experienced in decades. Studying how the human body responds to that environment was one of the mission’s stated scientific goals.
The suit
The EVA suit SpaceX developed for the mission is significant not just as a product but as a proof of concept. NASA’s existing EVA suits are decades old, complex, and in limited supply. The two suits on the ISS have been in use since 2006. SpaceX’s suit, designed to be slimmer and more maneuverable, is the first new American EVA suit in a generation.
The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was short and constrained. The crew did not venture far from the hatch. But the point was not operational capability. The point was demonstrating that the suit works in the actual environment it was designed for, and that civilians with rigorous training can operate it safely.
What comes next
Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned Polaris missions. The second mission will involve more complex EVA operations. The third, currently planned as the first crewed Starship orbital flight, would represent another order-of-magnitude increase in ambition.
The broader significance is about who gets to participate in spaceflight. For most of history, that question had a simple answer: military test pilots selected by national space agencies. That answer is changing, not all at once, but one mission at a time.