The space story of the week has been that of Polaris Dawn, the first ever spacewalk by non-governmental astronauts, when billionaire and mission commander Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer and mission specialist Sarah Gillis put their heads out of their SpaceX Dragon capsule. It probably wasn’t as spectacular as many people expected – there was no free floating around the capsule, and the astronauts didn’t leave the hatch – but it does mark a significant milestone in the rapidly developing commercial space sector.
Now, you may want to dismiss this as just another billionaire having fun with his vast wealth, but Isaacman bankrolled the mission with a view to pushing the technology, developing new spacesuit designs, undertaking scientific and medical research, as well as fundraising for a children’s hospital. There are far worse things he could be doing with his money!
And this was far from a tourist’s joyride. During their five-day mission the astronauts undertook more than 40 experiments, flew higher than any astronauts since the final Apollo mission (in 1972!), tested new communication techniques, and of course tested those new spacesuits. And they undertook a lot of training before hand, just like governmental astronauts are required to do, so that they knew what to expect (physically, technologically, and mentally) and were prepared for any number of eventualities.
Where no EVA has gone before
The jeopardy was very real. The spacesuits were an evolved design of the standard SpaceX spacesuits used for launch and reentry to protect the astronauts in case of a cabin depressurisation or change in temperature. Space agencies tend to provide astronauts with this type of suit for launch/reentry, and an entirely different, bulkier, more robust spacesuit for use on extravehicular activity (EVA, aka a spacewalk). That works, but requires more suits, and the bulky spacesuits are often not flexible enough to cope with different body types and shapes. This is a problem if you are going to want to mass produce them for your Mars colonists!
It was also different to most modern spacewalks in that there was no airlock. Go back to the days of the first spacewalks, like Ed White on Gemini IV, and no airlock was the norm, but on the International Space Station astronauts going outside for station maintenance or repairs will don their spacesuit, go into an airlock, depressurise the airlock, and then leave through an outer hatch. They have a pressurised space station to return to if they have any problems such as a suit leak, or something pokes a hole in it (or a micrometeorite or piece of space debris hits them). Dragon has no airlock, so all four crew members had to wear the suits before the entire cabin was depressurised.
And they all had to go through the preparation phase known as prebreathing, familiar to divers, where you gradually reduce the pressure and switch to breathing pure oxygen in order to remove nitrogen from your bloodstream. This reduces the risk of them suffering from decompression sickness, or the bends. Why do astronauts have to do this? Well, if your spacesuit was at atmospheric pressure it would be so stiff in the vacuum of space that it would be very difficult to move around or flex a joint. A spacesuit that can contain a pressure of one atmosphere against the vacuum of space needs to be very robust which makes it heavy and more rigid. By operating at a lower pressure, and having your astronauts undergo the required pre-breathing exercise in advance, a spacesuit can be thinner, lighter, more flexible, and much easier to use as a result.
Why it matters
For decades governmental organisations have led the way in space exploration. The Outer Space Treaty assumes this is the case, making space law an interesting and rapidly evolving field (not to mention the issues involved with space junk). Governmental space programmes are usually dependent on popular opinion for funding – either directly or indirectly (but this is not so much the case in China of course). NASA relies on congress to approve its funding, and congress are likely to think twice about giving the space programme more money when there is a cost of living crisis and they rely on votes to get elected. The European Space Agency also has a complicated landscape of national funders to negotiate.
NASA have worked with commercial firms for decades, with numerous contracts awarded to external companies for various aspects of the Apollo programme hardware for example. But the recent development and acceleration of the private space sector has enabled them to outsource more aspects of their operations. As well as the Commercial Crew Program (with SpaceX and Boeing awarded contracts to provide transportation services for crew and cargo to the ISS), there is also the Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS, sending payloads to the Moon). With billionaires starting to develop their own mini space programmes through these commercial operators, we are likely to see an acceleration of activity in manned space flight.
This is exciting and is likely to help push the technology ad capabilities of the private sector forwards, but of course it comes with risks – both for those participating as private astronauts, and for those of us on the ground who may find debris coming through our roofs! The more human activity in space, the more chance of something going wrong. That will, inevitably, result in fatalities.
The bigger picture
The more activity in space in total, both in terms of human spaceflight but also the thousands of satellites being launched into space forming megaconstellations, the higher the risk of collisions and serious damage to what has become an increasingly vital part of our communications infrastructure.
There is a strong case for better regulation for orbit occupancy, collision avoidance, light pollution, and the physical pollution caused by the large increase in satellite reentry numbers. It’s time for some consideration of space as an environment.
The space sector has become vital to much of the global economy, and it will be exciting to see it develop. But we need regulation and the law to catch up with reality.
