LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Tomorrow morning, four astronauts will lift off on a commercial mission with the company SpaceX. Once in orbit, they will attempt the first private spacewalk. As NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, it'll be a risky adventure.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: The mission's commander is Jared Isaacman. He's a wealthy tech entrepreneur who's paid an undisclosed amount of money for the chance to walk in space.
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JARED ISAACMAN: It's been a really exciting journey of development and training.
BRUMFIEL: Now it's finally happening. The SpaceX capsule called Dragon is set to lift off Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will spend the first few days running tests and getting used to space.
SARAH GILLIS: And then flight day three is the spacewalk.
BRUMFIEL: Sarah Gillis is a SpaceX engineer and one of the crew members. In order to do the spacewalk, all four will don brand-new suits that have never been tested in space before. Then they'll purge the air from the Dragon capsule.
GILLIS: Since Dragon doesn't have an airlock, the entire spacecraft is going to be going to vacuum.
BRUMFIEL: Once all the air is out, Isaacman and Gillis will open the hatch. One at a time, they'll climb out of the vehicle and spend a few minutes exposed to the vacuum of space. Isaacman says, they won't just be poking their heads out.
ISAACMAN: We'll be fully outside Dragon. Like, we'll be well above where the hatch is. We're just not going to be just floating around.
BRUMFIEL: They'll be testing the new spacesuits to see how they hold up. The view that awaits them is incredible, according to Luca Parmitano, a European Space Agency astronaut who's done six spacewalks. He says, you never get used to it.
LUCA PARMITANO: It's almost as if time stops for a second, or maybe it's your heart that stops for a second. It's just incredibly beautiful. Our planet is so beautiful, and it's right there.
BRUMFIEL: But Parmitano also knows that spacewalks are a lot riskier than going to space in a capsule. During his second spacewalk, his suit's cooling system failed, and his helmet started to fill with water.
PARMITANO: It covered my eyes, it covered my ears, and it went inside my nose.
BRUMFIEL: He couldn't wipe it away because there was no way to get his hand inside his helmet. He had to calmly return to the airlock, blind and unable to communicate with his radio. He says what kept him alive was his training. This SpaceX crew has trained for over two years for this mission, but it's all been on Earth.
JONATHAN CLARK: None of the crew has done an actual spacewalk before. It's going to be a first for everybody.
BRUMFIEL: Jonathan Clark is a physician at Baylor College of Medicine who's consulted on spacesuits for NASA and private companies, including SpaceX. He says, trying to move in a suit can be tough, and the environment is extremely hostile.
CLARK: The temperature can go up several hundred degrees in the sunlight, and it can go down several hundred degrees in the dark.
BRUMFIEL: Astronauts can get exhausted. They can overheat in the cramped suit. Even heavy breathing can be enough to fog a visor. By Clark's count, roughly 1 in 5 spacewalks encounter these problems and more. But newbies can do tough things in space. Sian Proctor was the pilot of Isaacman's first mission to orbit in 2021. Until six months before launch, she'd never flown a rocket.
SIAN PROCTOR: I basically went from being a geoscience professor to being a mission pilot of a spacecraft.
BRUMFIEL: Proctor says SpaceX got her ready. In fact, Sarah Gillis actually helped train her for her mission. Another member of this latest crew, Kidd Poteet, was the mission director for her launch.
PROCTOR: The crew is amazing because they are so competent in what they do.
BRUMFIEL: Proctor says, if anyone can carry out the first commercial spacewalk, it's them.
Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
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