Polaris Dawn — first commercial spacewalk

On 12 September 2024, the Polaris Dawn mission achieved the first spacewalk ever conducted by private astronauts. Commander Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis each ventured out of Crew Dragon to test SpaceX's newly developed extravehicular activity (EVA) suits, in a cabin-depressurization "stand-up" spacewalk.

The mission also flew higher than any crewed flight since the Apollo program, reaching an apogee of about 1,408 km — taking its crew through part of the Van Allen radiation belts to gather medical and engineering data.

Developing a spacewalk-capable suit and conducting a private EVA are extraordinarily demanding — the kind of capability that, until recently, only national space agencies possessed. Polaris Dawn showed that commercial spaceflight is advancing not just in tourism but in the hardest, most consequential frontiers of human space exploration.