The first private spacewalk is set for Thursday by a group of astronauts who will leave a SpaceX capsule after a delay of a few hours, testing a new line of spacesuits in the company's riskiest mission yet.
A billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees have been orbiting Earth aboard Crew Dragon since Tuesday's pre-dawn launch from Florida of the Polaris Dawn mission.
It is the Elon Musk-led company's latest and riskiest bid to push the boundaries of commercial spaceflight.
Live streaming of the event is set to begin at 4:55 a.m. ET (0855 GMT), SpaceX said on Thursday, with two astronauts venturing outside Crew Dragon while two stay inside. The capsule, at an altitude of 700 km (435 miles), will be completely depressurised, and the whole crew will rely on their slim, SpaceX-developed spacesuits for oxygen.
Jared Isaacman, 41, a pilot and the billionaire founder of electronic payments company Shift4 is bankrolling the Polaris mission, as he did his Inspiration4 flight with SpaceX in 2021.
He has declined to say how much he is paying for the missions, but they are likely to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, based on Crew Dragon's price of roughly USD 55 million a seat for other flights.
The others in Polaris include mission pilot Scott Poteet, 50, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel, and SpaceX employees Sarah Gillis, 30 and Anna Menon, 38, both senior engineers.
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