The mission is the first of three funded by payments processing business founder Jared Isaacman.
Billionaire Jared Isaacman has taken off in a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for what he hopes will be the first ever privately funded spacewalk.
The astronauts will pass through a region of space known as the Van Allen belt, which has high levels of radiation, but the crew will be protected by the spacecraft and their newly upgraded spacesuits. This will be while they are 700km in orbit. The astronauts will be testing new extravehicular activity astronaut suits which, as their name suggests, have been upgraded from Space X’s intravehicular activity suits for working outside of spacecraft.The EVA suit incorporates a heads-up display in its helmet, which provides information about the suit while it is being used.
A unique aspect of the spacewalk is that the Dragon spacecraft, called Resilience, does not have an airlock, which is a sealed room between the doorway into the vacuum outside and the rest of the spacecraft. Tests on the impact of radiation from the Van Allen belts as well as the spacewalk are intended to lay the ground for further high-altitude missions by the private sector possibly to the Moon or Mars.There are an awful lot of firsts for the rookie crew to achieve. Isaacman has been in space only once before and the other three have never flown in space.
If the mission is a success, some analysts believe that it will be the start of an explosion of ever greater and cheaper private sector missions taking more people further than government space agencies have.“The record so far has been a huge amount of money spent by the private sector, lots of dribs and drabs of publicity, but much less than 100 additional people on top of the 500 or so government-funded astronauts travelling to space and back, and many of those only for very brief periods.
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