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SpaceX Launches Billionaire to Conduct the First Private Spacewalk 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule, carrying the crew of the Polaris Dawn Mission, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule, carrying the crew of the Polaris Dawn Mission, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)
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SpaceX Launches Billionaire to Conduct the First Private Spacewalk 

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule, carrying the crew of the Polaris Dawn Mission, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon Resilience capsule, carrying the crew of the Polaris Dawn Mission, lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 10, 2024. (AFP)

A daredevil billionaire rocketed back to space Tuesday, aiming to perform the first private spacewalk and venture farther than anyone since NASA's Apollo moonshots.

Unlike his previous chartered flight, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman shared the cost with SpaceX this time around, which included developing and testing brand new spacesuits to see how they'll hold up in the harsh vacuum.

If all goes as planned, it will be the first time private citizens conduct a spacewalk, but they won’t venture away from the capsule. Considered one of the most riskiest parts of spaceflight, spacewalks have been the sole realm of professional astronauts since the former Soviet Union popped open the hatch in 1965, closely followed by the US. Today, they are routinely done at the International Space Station.

Isaacman, along with a pair of SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbirds pilot, launched before dawn aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The spacewalk is scheduled for late Wednesday or Thursday, midway through the five-day flight.

But first the passengers are shooting for way beyond the International Space Station — an altitude of 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), which would surpass the Earth-lapping record set during NASA’s Project Gemini in 1966. Only the 24 Apollo astronauts who flew to the moon have ventured farther.

The plan is to spend 10 hours at that height — filled with extreme radiation and riddled with debris — before reducing the oval-shaped orbit by half. Even at this lower 435 miles (700 kilometers), the orbit would eclipse the space station and even the Hubble Space Telescope, the highest shuttle astronauts flew.

All four wore SpaceX’s spacewalking suits because the entire Dragon capsule will be depressurized for the two-hour spacewalk, exposing everyone to the dangerous environment.

Isaacman and SpaceX's Sarah Gillis will take turns briefly popping out of the hatch. They’ll test their white and black-trimmed custom suits by twisting their bodies. Both will always have a hand or foot touching the capsule or attached support structure that resembles the top of a pool ladder. There will be no dangling at the end of their 12-foot (3.6-meter) tethers and no jetpack showboating. Only NASA’s suits at the space station come equipped with jetpacks, for emergency use only.

Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX’s Anna Menon will monitor the spacewalk from inside. Like SpaceX’s previous astronaut flights, this one will end with a splashdown off the Florida coast.

At a preflight news conference, Isaacman — CEO and founder of the credit card processing company Shift4 — refused to say how much he invested in the flight. “Not a chance,” he said.

SpaceX teamed up with Isaacman to pay for spacesuit development and associated costs, said William Gerstenmaier, a SpaceX vice president who once headed space mission operations for NASA.

“We’re really starting to push the frontiers with the private sector,” Gerstenmaier said.

It’s the first of three trips that Isaacman bought from Elon Musk 2 1/2 years ago, soon after returning from his first private SpaceX spaceflight in 2021. Isaacman bankrolled that tourist ride for an undisclosed sum, taking along contest winners and a childhood cancer survivor. The trip raised hundreds of millions for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

Spacesuit development took longer than anticipated, delaying this first so-called Polaris Dawn flight until now. Training was extensive; Poteet said it rivaled anything he experienced during his Air Force flying career.

As SpaceX astronaut trainers, Gillis and Menon helped Isaacman and his previous team — as well as NASA’s professional crews — prepare for their rides.

“I wasn’t alive when humans walked on the moon. I’d certainly like my kids to see humans walking on the moon and Mars, and venturing out and exploring our solar system,” the 41-year-old Isaacman said before liftoff.

Poor weather caused a two-week delay. The crew needed favorable forecasts not only for launch, but for splashdown days later. With limited supplies and no ability to reach the space station, they had no choice but to wait for conditions to improve.

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Pollution of Potent Warming Gas Methane Soars and People Are Mostly to Blame 

Excavators transfer coal at the coal terminal of Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang, in China's eastern Jiangsu province on January 22, 2024. (AFP)
Excavators transfer coal at the coal terminal of Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang, in China's eastern Jiangsu province on January 22, 2024. (AFP)
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Pollution of Potent Warming Gas Methane Soars and People Are Mostly to Blame 

Excavators transfer coal at the coal terminal of Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang, in China's eastern Jiangsu province on January 22, 2024. (AFP)
Excavators transfer coal at the coal terminal of Lianyungang Port in Lianyungang, in China's eastern Jiangsu province on January 22, 2024. (AFP)

The amount and proportion of the powerful heat-trapping gas methane that humans spew into the atmosphere is rising, helping to turbocharge climate change, a new study found.

Tuesday’s study said that in 2020, the last year complete data is available, the world put 670 million tons (608 million metric tons) of methane in the air, up nearly 12% from 2000. An even more significant finding in the study in Environmental Research Letters was the source of those emissions: those from humans jumped almost 18% in two decades, while natural emissions, mostly from wetlands, inched up just 2% in the same time.

Methane levels in the air are now 2.6 times higher than in pre-industrial times, the study said. Methane levels in the air had plateaued for a while in the early 2000s, but now are soaring. Humans cause methane emissions by burning fossil fuels, engaging in large-scale agriculture and filling up landfills.

“Methane is a climate menace that the world is ignoring,” said study lead author Rob Jackson, head of the Global Carbon Project, which is a group of scientists who monitor greenhouse gas emissions yearly. “Methane has risen far more and much faster than carbon dioxide.”

Carbon dioxide is still the biggest threat, added Jackson, a Stanford University climate scientist. Humans, mostly through the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, put 60 times more carbon dioxide in the air than methane and it lasts thousands of years.

Because methane leaves the atmosphere in about a decade, it's a powerful “lever” that humans can use to fight climate change, Jackson said. That's because cutting it could yield relatively quick benefits.

In 2000, 60% of the methane spewed into the air came from direct human activity. Now it's 65%, the study found.

“It's a very worrying paper, but actually not a big surprise unfortunately,” said climate scientist Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, who wasn't part of the research. He said for the world to keep warming to an agreed-upon limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide emissions nearly in half and methane by more than one-third.

But Jackson said the current trend with methane emissions has the world on target for warming of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit), twice the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Jackson's study mostly focused on where the methane is coming from, both by location and source.

Geographically, everywhere but Europe is increasing in human-caused methane emissions, with large jumps in Asia, especially China and India, Jackson said.

In the last 20 years, methane emissions from coal mining, oil and gas have jumped 33%, while landfill and waste increased 20% and agriculture emissions rose 14%, according to the study. The biggest single human-connected source of emissions are cows, Jackson said.

Cornell University climate scientist Robert Howarth faulted the study for not sufficiently emphasizing methane emissions from the boom in shale gas drilling, known as fracking. He said that boom began in 2005 and coincided with a sharp rise in methane emissions, including a spike of about 13 million tons (11.7 million metric tons) in the United States alone since then.

Jackson said the rise in natural methane from tropical wetlands was triggered by warmer temperatures that caused microbes to spew more gas. He called it disturbing because “we don't have any way of reducing” those emissions.

In 2021, countries promised to do something about methane, but it's not working yet, Jackson said.

Though Jackson's data runs only through 2020, he said global monitoring of methane levels in the air show that “we know that concentrations in the last four or five years rose faster than at any time in the instrument record. So that alone tells us that the global methane pledge is not having a substantive effect on methane emissions and concentrations.”

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, who wasn't part of the research, said: “We have a lot more work to do if we want to avoid the most dire consequences of global warming.”