NPR’s Scott Detrow speaks with Jared Isaacman, who recently commanded the Polaris Dawn mission, about what it was like to be the first private citizen to walk in space.
SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
The other week, Polaris Dawn Commander Jared Isaacman left his spacecraft and stepped into space.
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JARED ISAACMAN: You know, SpaceX, back at home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.
DETROW: It was the first-ever private spacewalk, a key moment in a groundbreaking private space mission called Polaris Dawn, Isaacman and three other astronauts who traveled on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket. Jared Isaacman, welcome back to Earth and welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ISAACMAN: Man, it’s good to be back, and happy to be here.
DETROW: You know, we hear that moment. I want to broadly talk about the mission in a bit, but I just want to start with this. What were your first thoughts as you peeked out of the spacecraft?
ISAACMAN: It was a very emotional experience. I mean, for starters, you know, we were taking about 14,000 people with us on that spacewalk. That’s how many people are at SpaceX that have been working tirelessly for the last, you know, 2 1/2 years to construct an entirely new spacesuit, which doesn’t happen often – the last time was probably 40 years ago – figure out the entire operations to do it safely and repressurize the vehicle. So we took that as a pretty serious obligation to kind of deliver on our end of the deal, which is – admittedly, comes with a great view.
We got out there, and it was, you know, a little bit of a sensory overload because it’s not just visual stimulus. You know, you have big pressure changes. There’s temperature swings. It’s cold. There’s adrenaline firing. It’s physical. It takes a lot to move inside a space suit because…
DETROW: Yeah.
ISAACMAN: …It’s essentially a mini spaceship once it’s pressurized. We just wanted to get out there and, you know, get the job done, bring data back so they can make suits that people will take to Mars someday.
DETROW: That’s interesting because people think about the weightlessness, but you’re saying, no, it’s actually really physically challenging to move in these suits.
ISAACMAN: Oh, yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong. When you’re not in a spacesuit and you’re just floating in Dragon, that is incredibly pleasant. And there is no exertion there. I mean, you just move your pinky against the wall, and you’ll, you know, gradually drift to the other side of the spaceship. But when you’re in a spacesuit, and that’s pressurized up to, you know, 5-plus PSI, what normally feels like heavy clothing is a rigid structure. And it’s containing the oxygen that’s needed to thermally regulate your body and keep you alive while you’re doing a spacewalk.
DETROW: You were out of the spacecraft for about 10 minutes or so. You had a lot of stuff to do and test out. How much time did you take just to look at the view?
ISAACMAN: Seconds.
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ISAACMAN: I think we barely finished the three-test matrix before we had to get back in. The entire operation was about 90 minutes where you’re breathing 100% oxygen. That’s ultimately the limiting factor. So if we were able to get through all the venting operations and the hatch opening quicker, we would have spent more time outside, but we were out there long enough to get what we need and bring it back.
DETROW: Are you able to say at this point what the top line is that you learned from testing out the spacesuits, or do you need to analyze the data a lot more?
ISAACMAN: So our first debriefs are on Monday. There’ll be data review through the balance of the year. But I mean, there’s some things we knew already. I mean, at some point, you kind of had to lock in the design. I think it’s pretty clear we’ll move on from air cooling to liquid cooling – basically increase the efficiency of the oxygen we’re carrying ’cause we’re not wasting it cooling our bodies – a portable life support system, for sure.
And I think the more we can increase pressure without truly hampering mobility and dexterity, the better because then you’re a lot closer to that sci-fi – just throw on the helmet and go outside. For us, it took three days of a prebreathe to gradually denitrogenate our bodies to avoid decompression sickness. So there’s some basics we know, but there’s a whole lot they’ll get from the data, and we’ll kind of cover that with them through the balance of the year.
DETROW: This is the first of three connected Polaris missions. Can you take a step back and remind us of what the long-term goals are here?
ISAACMAN: The Polaris program, which is a joint program with SpaceX, is designed to bridge the gap between the highly successful Dragon spaceship that exists today and that is – that takes numerous NASA astronauts to the Space Station every six months, and Starship. And Starship is a total game-changer. I mean, it’s clearly only in test right now, but, you know, more than double the thrust of the Saturn V rocket. It’s the vehicle that NASA has already contracted with to return astronauts to the moon, and it’s designed to make life multiplanetary, you know, literally factories to make hundreds of Starships so people can go out and explore our solar system and really journey among the stars.
So there is an awful lot to learn from the world we’re in today with Dragon to Starship. We need lots of spacesuits for the thousands of people that’ll be in space at some point. We need new methods of communication like Starlink laser links, and we need to venture outside the comfort area of low earth orbit where the space station is. All three of those points were wrapped up in objectives for Polaris Dawn.
DETROW: I want to end going back to that spacewalk. What was the biggest difference between what you thought it would be like and what it was actually like?
ISAACMAN: I think training on Earth, I just assumed it would be much more of that visual experience. Now, we’ve been in vacuum chambers at NASA, and, you know, I’m certainly familiar with temperature transience and the pressure changes. I just didn’t expect it to all kind of fuse together at once and be such an intense, I guess, emotional experience being out there. Earth looked certainly beautiful, just as you would expect. But then looking out into the darkness of space, it was a very unwelcoming feeling that this is a threatening environment for humans. We certainly didn’t evolve to be here, and if we want to be here, we’re going to have to work really hard in order to kind of open up this last frontier. That was kind of one of the big takeaways I had.
DETROW: That’s Polaris Dawn Mission Commander Jared Isaacman, who is now the first civilian to walk in space. Thank you so much.
ISAACMAN: Thanks for having me.
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