The News
SpaceX and a crew of four private citizens completed the first spacewalk ever undertaken by non-governmental astronauts Thursday.
A live broadcast showed Jared Isaacman, the billionaire captain of the mission, pop out of the Dragon capsule’ hatch, followed by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis. The two other crew members remained inside.
“Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said.
The operation was riskier than typical spacewalks conducted by astronauts on the International Space Station, for example: While Isaacman and Gillis were outside, the Dragon capsule opened to the vacuum of space, and the entire crew depended on life support systems during the spacewalk, before the capsule closed and re-pressurized.
SIGNALS
Commercial spacewalks open new industry possibilities
The spacewalk is a milestone for commercial space. As increasingly ambitious private flights become more common, these firsts open up new possibilities for future non-governmental missions, The New York Times noted. It could allow for operations “once impossible to imagine,” like sending technicians to fix private satellites in orbit. Isaacman himself has floated sending a private mission to repair NASA’s aging Hubble Space Telescope, as NASA once did in the 1990s and early 2000s. Other missions may be less altruistic, The Atlantic posited: “SpaceX customers may dream of using Dragon to clean up space junk… or to simply float untethered from a spacecraft because Bruce McCandless looked cool doing it in 1988.”
Elon Musk’s SpaceX wields outsized influence over space exploration...
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has an outsized influence over American space exploration, The Atlantic wrote, despite competition from industry stalwarts like Boeing and Northrop Grumman, or more recent upstarts like Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and New Zealand-based Rocket Lab. SpaceX distinguishes itself in that it “continues to press ahead with reserves of money, momentum and a wartime-like urgency that Musk has infused into the company,” The Washington Post noted. As Musk’s star has risen, NASA’s struggles for funding have made it rely increasingly on private companies, and especially SpaceX, to fulfill scientific goals, which could in turn lead it to lose in-house expertise to the private sector.
… But that influence may yield its own problems
Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink internet constellation accounts for almost two-thirds of the 9,000 or so active satellites in orbit around Earth. That dominance has led Starlink to be added to the Federal Communications Commission’s watchlist for potentially violating antitrust laws. Elsewhere, SpaceX is locked in a yearslong battle with the Federal Aviation Administration over what it perceives as egregious delays and “superfluous environmental analysis” that slow down tests of its next-generation rocket, Starship. Concerns over the environmental impact of SpaceX are also growing after a report found the company released polluting agents in water in Texas, CNBC reported.