Polaris Dawn — first commercial spacewalk

In the early morning of 12 September 2024, more than 700 kilometers above Earth, the hatch of Crew Dragon Resilience swung open to vacuum. Jared Isaacman, a billionaire pilot who had paid for the mission himself, rose into the void wearing a spacesuit no government had built. Below him the planet turned, higher than any spacewalker had ever seen it. For 59 years, every one of the hundreds of spacewalks in history had been conducted by government astronauts from three nations. That monopoly ended in the minutes that followed, broadcast live around the world.

Dragon has no airlock, so there was no halfway measure: the entire cabin was vented to space, and all four crew members, Isaacman, pilot Scott Poteet, and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, were exposed to vacuum in their suits at once, more people in vacuum simultaneously than ever before. After a multi-day pre-breathe protocol to purge nitrogen, Isaacman climbed out onto a mobility aid called the skywalker for just under eight minutes of suit testing. Gillis followed for about seven, flexing the new SpaceX extravehicular suit on its first flight. From hatch open to close, the exposure lasted roughly 26 minutes.

The spacewalk crowned a mission already stacked with records. On its first day, Resilience raised its apogee to about 1,408 kilometers, the highest Earth orbit ever flown by a crewed spacecraft and the farthest humans had traveled since the Apollo program, sending the crew through the inner Van Allen radiation belt. Gillis and Menon went farther from Earth than any women in history, and Gillis, at 30, became the youngest person ever to spacewalk. The crew ran nearly 40 science experiments, tested Starlink laser communications from orbit, and Gillis played her violin in microgravity before splashdown near Florida's Dry Tortugas on 15 September after five days and 75 orbits.