Jared Isaacman, who conducted the spacewalk on SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission, called space a “hard, very threatening environment”
The first billionaire to conduct a private spacewalk said it wasn’t a particularly “peaceful” experience and compared his journey to explorers trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean.The first billionaire to conduct a private spacewalk said it wasn’t a particularly “peaceful” experience and compared his journey to explorers trying to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
“Looking at Earth was obviously very, very special,” Isaacman said in a conversation hosted on Twitter Spaces Tuesday. “But when you look off to the side, you look out into the darkness of space, and you see your spaceship there, and how gritty it looks, it gave you this sense of, like ‘this isn’t going to be easy.’”
Isaacman described outer space as a “hard, very threatening environment.”
“It wasn’t [anything] I would describe as peaceful when you’re looking out in the darkness of space,” he continued, “If anything, it was a little bit more of like: ‘If you want to be here, you’re going to have to work for it.’”
Isaacman made the remarks after SpaceX said it plans to have an unmanned mission land on Mars in two years and humans on Mars in four years. The CEO said he imagines looking out into vast expanse of space today feels similar to the explorers five centuries ago on a mission to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
“You shouldn’t interpret that feeling of danger and unwelcomeness as a deterrent, but it’s just more to rise to the challenge, just as explorers had to do throughout human history,” he added.
The Polaris Dawn conducted dozens of science experiments while in space to study the impact on the human body as it tries to better understand how to make the environment livable for humans.
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