The four crew members of Polaris Dawn can breathe easy again after having vented the entire atmosphere of their SpaceX Crew Dragon so its commander and billionaire Jared Isaacman along with crewmate and SpaceX employee Sarah Gillis could venture outside the spacecraft and perform the first commercial spacewalk Thursday.

The duo performed the historic feat, each connected by a 12-foot-long tether, in less than two hours, each outside the spacecraft for a little more than 10 minutes.

Crewmates Scott Poteet and Anna Menon remained inside the Dragon, but all four had to wear SpaceX’s new extravehicular activity (EVA) suits because the spacecraft does not have an airlock — so they were all subjected to the vacuum of space.

Isaacman led the way opening the forward hatch of Dragon as it orbited 460 miles above the planet.

“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said amid cheers from SpaceX headquarters during the company’s livestream of the event.

With the blue globe of Earth in the background, the spacecraft flew into the shadow of night as Isaacman performed a series of maneuvers while never losing contact with a mobility structure called “Skywalker” that stuck out from the end of the spacecraft.

Commander @rookisaacman has egressed Dragon and is going through the first of three suit mobility tests that will test overall hand body control, vertical movement with Skywalker, and foot restraint pic.twitter.com/XATJQhLuIZ

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 12, 2024

Gillis followed, performing the same maneuvers, all part of a test of how the new suits worked for SpaceX.

The endeavor was risky in that if the hatch had not been able to close properly, the four would have had to perform an emergency landing while wearing EVA suits.

But the hatch was closed tight and the cabin repressurized successfully, which allowed the four to remove their EVA suits to continue the rest of their flight. The spacewalk began at 6:12 a.m. and ended just before 8 a.m. for a total of 1 hour and 46 minutes.

They became the 264th and 265th people to perform a spacewalk — but all previous had been under the auspices of government space agencies.

The first spacewalk came in 1965 performed by Alexei Leonov of the Soviet Union. NASA astronaut Ed White followed suit the same year.

SpaceX launches Polaris Dawn spacewalk mission taking billionaire to space for 2nd time

Polaris Dawn, which launched from Kennedy Space Center early Tuesday, is the first of up to three missions under what is called the Polaris Program led by Isaacman in partnership with SpaceX.

He made his fortune with credit-card-processing company Shift4 Payments and first flew to space in 2021 on Inspiration4. The final mission of the Polaris Program will be the first human spaceflight of SpaceX’s in-development Starship and Super Heavy.

“All of the objectives of the Polaris Program have to answer the question, ‘Does this help get us to Mars?’” Isaacman said in the months after announcing his partnership with Elon Musk’s company. “There’s a lot of learning that needs to take place as space opens up beyond just the few and into the many.

“So, spacewalk, yay. If we’re going to go to moon and make life multiplanetary, we’re going to have to leave the safety and comfort of the habitat or the vehicle to do this.”

Isaacman has declined to say how much of his own money he’s spent on any of the private missions.

The spacewalk comes halfway through the five-day mission, which saw the Crew Dragon fly to an altitude of 870 miles, the farthest for any human spacecraft in a low-Earth orbit and the highest altitude ever traveled by women. The Apollo moon missions traveled a farther distance from Earth — but not in an Earth orbit.

SpaceX snaps Earth shot during Polaris Dawn high-altitude run

The point of the altitude test was to subject Dragon to the radiation within the Van Allen belts in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

The mission also has a laser-based communication technology demonstration using point-to-point Starlink hardware while the quartet perform more than 30 science and research experiments on board.

They are slated to splash back down off the Florida coast in either the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic early Sunday.