Spacewalk, the final frontier for the rich

A pioneering private crew made history yesterday by performing the first commercial spacewalk, with Nasa hailing it as "a giant leap forward" for the space industry.

The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission, led by fintech billionaire Jared Isaacman, launched on Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, journeying deeper into the cosmos than any humans in half a century, since the Apollo era.

With the four-member crew's Dragon spacecraft adjusted to an orbit with a high of 700km, pure oxygen began flowing into their suits yesterday, marking the official start of their extravehicular activity (EVA) at 1012 GMT.

A short time later, Isaacman swung open the hatch and climbed through, gripping the hand and footholds of a structure known as Skywalker, as a breathtaking view of earth unfolded below him.

"SpaceX, back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, earth sure looks like a perfect world," he told mission control in Hawthorne, California.

It was yet another major milestone for SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk in 2002.