– Two private astronauts who performed the first commercial spacewalk did not so much float out of their spacecraft as “stand up.”

Polaris Dawn crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis took turns climbing out of the top hatch of SpaceX’s Dragon Resilience spacecraft on Thursday (September 12), marking the first time non-governmental astronauts have left the protective confines of their vehicle and stepped into the void of space. It was also the 20th stand-up spacewalk (SEVA) in history.

“I think we all still have a lot of work to do at home, but from here, Earth really does look like a perfect world,” Isaacman said as he exited the Dragon’s hatch and saw the illuminated planet before launching into a night transit.

Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur who funded that five-day flight and two other Polaris program missions, was the first to poke his helmet-covered head out of the position where a docking ring would normally be when Dragon was connected to the International Space Station. Instead, SpaceX equipped the capsule with the “Skywalker,” a series of rails and footrests specially designed to keep the tethered and umbilical-connected astronauts in contact with the vehicle.

With the Dragon’s nose pointed toward Earth, the extended nose cap served as protection against passing micrometeoroid debris. Isaacman and Gillis each spent about 10 minutes putting SpaceX’s EVA suit through its paces.

“It has all kinds of technology in it, including a head-up display, a helmet camera (and) a whole new architecture for joint mobility,” Polaris Dawn crew member Anna Menon said of SpaceX’s new EVA suits during a pre-fight press conference. “The suit has thermal insulation throughout, including a copper and indium tin oxide visor that provides both thermal and sun protection. And then there’s all kinds of redundancy throughout, both in the oxygen supply to the suit and all the valves and all the seals throughout the suit.”

On board Resilience, Scott “Kidd” Poteet and Menon also wore EVA spacesuits, as Dragon had no airlock and the entire cabin had to be depressurized for their crew members to spacewalk. The same approach was first used by NASA for its Gemini spacecraft in the mid-1960s. It was then that the distinction between performing a full EVA, a SEVA or IVA (intravehicular activity) was first defined.

Poteet and Menon, members of the IVA crew, helped Isaacman and Gillis by tackling the 2.4-meter-long supply lines that supplied oxygen and power to the two astronauts’ suits and ran from their clothing to the interior of the Dragon.

By never leaving the Dragon’s vestibule entirely – they kept at least part of their bodies there the entire time – Isaacman and Gillis increased the number of standing EVAs they have performed since 1966, when NASA astronaut Michael Collins stood up from his seat and took photos outside the hatch on the pilot’s side of the Gemini 10 capsule.

“We’re not going to be floating around,” Isaacman said of his own SEVA before the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission. “We want to learn from history and always maintain at least one point of contact.”

In the 58 years since Collins’ first spacewalk, other astronauts, Russian cosmonauts and Chinese taikonauts have emerged from the hatches of spacecraft.

In 1969, David Scott stood out of the command module hatch while his Apollo 9 crewmate Rusty Schweickart performed a full spacewalk outside the lunar module during an orbit test. Two years later, Scott performed a SEVA from the upper hatch of Apollo 15’s lunar module to explore his surroundings before performing three lunar walks on the lunar surface.

Apollo astronauts Jim Irwin, Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmitt also performed stand-up EVAs to photograph their crewmates while retrieving footage and science results during three EVAs in the depths of space between the Moon and Earth.

In 1977, Georgi Grechko and Yuri Romanenko became the first cosmonauts to perform a standing spacewalk. Grechko floated halfway out of the airlock of the Salyut 6 space station and inspected a docking adapter for damage while both tested the then-brand-new Orlan spacesuits.

The last EVA before Polaris Dawn took place in 2008 during the first spacewalk by a Chinese taikonaut. Liu Boming spent most of the 22-minute EVA in the orbital module of the Shenzhou 7 spacecraft, but at one point he stood up and handed Zhai Zhigang a Chinese national flag to wave outside.

The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was the 477th EVA (of any kind) in history. The spacewalk began at 6:12 a.m. EDT (10:12 a.m. GMT), when the crew switched the oxygen supply to their suits, and lasted one hour and 46 minutes.