Billionaire businessman Jared Isaacman and fellow astronaut Sarah Gillis, have created history by carrying out the first privately funded space walks by non-professional astronauts.

They spent 10 minutes each outside of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship, some 435 miles above the Earth.

American Isaacman is an entrepreneur, pilot, philanthropist, and commercial astronaut and has bankrolled the five-day Polaris Dawn mission.

It was the first time a spacewalk has been attempted without an airlock and on leaving the spacecraft first and entering the vacuum of space, Isaacman said: “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”

Those words may go on to become as famous as Neil Armstrong’s line of “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” uttered in 1969, when stepping on to the surface of the moon for the first time.

Until this point only government-funded astronauts have been able to walk in space.

Incredible pictures of Earth

On returning to the craft, Isaacman allowed Ms Gillis to replace him outside and between them they were able to send back some extraordinary images from a helmet mounted camera, as they orbited Earth, flying over Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica hundreds of miles below.

Crew with little or no prior experience

Remarkably, the crew are complete novices; with Isaacman the only one with any previous experience, the other three on board are absolute first-timers.

That is not to suggest his fellow astronauts simply stepped aboard without any training, they have in fact been training for several years; but it will still have been both nerve-jangling and exhilarating to go through the experience, with a good deal of jeopardy riding on it.

Funded by the mission leader

The 41-year-old billionaire Isaacman founded the payment processing company, Shift4 Payments back in 1999, which apparently handles payments for a third of America’s restaurants and hotels. He also founded Draken International, which owns the world’s largest private fleet of military aircraft.He began taking flying lessons twenty years ago and within five years he had set a world record for circumnavigating the world in a light jet. He is said to have a net worth of just short of $2bn, so with a reported cost of $200m for this mission he will still be pretty comfortable.

From intern to walking in space

His co-space-walker, 30-year-old Sarah Gillis, actually began at SpaceX on an internship, working on various testing departments, before moving full-time to the astronaut training program.

The other two onboard were 38-year-old Anna Menon, serving as the medical officer, and 50-year-old Scott Poteet, a retired US Air Force pilot.

Untested spacesuits

They all wore what are known as extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits, which provided greater mobility and have dual capabilities, but essentially they were untested, so nobody knew for sure how they would react when the craft became depressurised and exposed to the space vacuum outside.

Mission unregulated

Although Menon and Poteet did not take part in the walk, they were still taking a huge risk as the four of them were attempting something not tried for decades and that was a spacewalk without an airlock, which impacted on all four of them.

They all had to sign consent form, with Nasa confirming that it has no involvement with the Polaris Dawn mission, whilst the US Federal Aviation Administration who had oversight of the Dragon rocket and craft initially, said once it entered space, it became unregulated.

Part of an exclusive club

Having completed the walks, Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis have created new milestones in the history of spaceflight.

They join an exclusive club of only around 260 other people to have ventured outside a spacecraft with nothing but a spacesuit between them and the vastness of the Universe.

As exciting as that may be, they needed a cool head and a good deal of bravery, because things can, and have gone wrong in the past, so it is still a long way from the point where the ordinary punter with lots of cash can look forward to their own personal spacewalk.