60 years since the first moonwalk now it's private Enterprise stepping out into space here sure looks like a perfect world The Moment the first human being who is not a professional astronaut emerged into the darkness of space good evening hundreds of miles above Earth a bit of History has been made with the first ever privately funded Space Walk until recently it's been governments which have backed space exploration but the tech entrepreneur Jason isaacman teamed up with Elon musk's SpaceX to finance the groundbreaking Venture and this is the image of Mr isaacman emerging from the spacecraft silhouetted against a spectacular view of Earth here's our science correspondent palab go back at home we all have a lot of work to do but from here birth Ser looks like a perfect world historic words for an historic moment out comes the first private sector astronaut to walk in space silhouetted in Earth's orbit billionaire Jared isaacman paid millions of dollars for this experience he remains partly in the capsule so more baby steps than a walk-in space but a chance to move around in the newly developed space suit to test its Mobility the entire operation end end is 2 hours so we just got to kind of see how um how everything progresses through it but we don't need very long out there and frankly we you know other than the test Matrix we're not building structure on the International Space Station or repairing anything uh so as soon as we get the data that we have we'll we'll cycle another crew member in and out that other crew member is Mission specialist Sarah Gillis it's her first time in space and she's already making history standing outside the Dragon capsule most crude spacecraft have an airlock which is sealed door between the vacuum of space and the rest of the spacecraft normally it's depressurized when astronaut go in and out but Dragon doesn't have an airlock so the entire craft has to be depressurized the non-space walking astronauts have to be fully suited up and strapped into their chairs an extra nitrogen and oxygen have to be added to repressurize the capsule when The Space Walk is [Applause] over the astronauts blasted off on Tuesday going further into space since the Apollo Moon missions of the 1960s and '70s this spacecraft reached a maximum altitude of 870 Mi above the Earth that's nearly 3 and 1 half times a distance to the International Space Station which is 250 Mi its orbit took it through a region of space that's higher in radiation called the Van Allen belt which starts at about 600 mil but the astronauts were safe inside their spacecraft The Vessel then came below the radiation belt to 435 Mi so the astronauts could carry out their space walk safely up until now every single Space Walk that's happened has been professional astronauts through a government agency either the Soviets or the Americans the Russians these days and so to have the first one that's done commercially is is a big step forward for the commercial space sector and it's going to push the boundaries of what they can do and it will extend their capabilities and we're likely to see many more of these in the in the future it was 60 years ago that Alexa leonov became the first person to walk in space since then it's only been astronauts working for government space agencies to have done this until now this is the first ever private sector crew to have walked in Space the aim is to reduce cost so that space travel can become more commonplace and humans can have a long-term presence on the moon and possibly even on Mars rather than just stpp out of a spacecraft next time we might be stepping onto the surface of the Moon we might be building research bases and places for people to live for extended periods of time on the moon you know everything is incremental but it's it's There's real forward momentum gaining now the historic space walk now over and so many firsts already achieved the crew's attention turns to carrying out experiments before beginning their journey home in two days time palab go BBC News and palab is with me palab lots of people very excited by this are we entering a new era of space exploitation exploration is a new era and I'm excited too um 50 years ago 12 men landed on the moon and then nothing not a lot happened but that Rush is back on and it was triggered by China announcing that it wanted to see an astronaut on the moon so all of a sudden it became about geopolitics of uh dominance in space of national security so after Decades of not caring US Congress suddenly started pouring money into it and other nations have their interest in Europe and Asia and if you add to that the private sector that's getting Bolder and Bolder driving down the costs of space travel all taken together we will get back to the Moon we'll get there often and we likely to stay okay thank you very much