Four civilians made history on Thursday (12) as the first group of people to carry out a commercial spacewalk during the mission Polaris Dawn from the SpaceX.
Jared Isaacman, CEO of Shift4 Payments and one of the mission’s funders, was the first to open the hatch and exit the Crew Dragon capsule. The crew also includes three other members: his close friend and former U.S. Air Force pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet; and SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.
The team underwent a process known as “pre-breathing,” a step designed to purge nitrogen from their blood to prevent the gas from forming bubbles — a potentially lethal condition — as they experience the vacuum of space.
Isaacman and Gillis were the only two crew members to actually exit the spacecraft, and they did so for a combined total of about 20 minutes.
They climbed onto a mobility aid — essentially a ladder that SpaceX has dubbed a “skywalker” — to venture into the endless void and take in the view.

Meet Jared Isaacman, the first civilian to walk in space
This is the second trip to space for Jared Isaacman, the billionaire founder of payments company Shift4. He made a less risky trip in 2021 on another SpaceX mission called Inspiration4 — the first all-civilian space mission.
He is one of the creators of the Polaris Dawn mission and, therefore, played an important role in selecting who would be his crewmates.
“[A missão] is set up with ambitious goals. So you assemble the best team possible to do that,” he told CNN.
Isaacman is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a leading integrated payment processing solutions company in the United States — responsible for managing payments for approximately one-third of the country’s restaurants and hotels.
Part of Forbes’ billionaires list, he founded the company at age 16 in his parents’ basement in New Jersey in 1999.
In 2011, he also founded Draken International, a defense contractor that trains U.S. Air Force pilots and owns the world’s largest privately owned fleet of military aircraft. Isaacman is a pilot and has over 7,000 hours of flight experience in aviation.
Meet the Crew Dragon, the spacecraft that will “save” astronauts from Starliner
This content was originally published in Jared Isaacman: who is the billionaire who made the first civilian spacewalk? on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil

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