CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A billionaire astronaut returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day journey that took them higher than anyone has traveled since NASA astronauts.
The SpaceX capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Dry Tortugas, Florida, in the pre-dawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.
They successfully completed the first private spacewalk, orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,408 kilometers) after Tuesday’s liftoff.
Isaacman became just the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union did the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks have been conducted by professional astronauts.
“We have completed our mission,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule floated in the water, awaiting the recovery team.
During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch remained open for just a half-hour. Isaacman went out waist-deep only to briefly test SpaceX’s newest spacesuit, followed by Gillis, who was knee-deep as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also performed in orbit earlier in the week.
The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, much less than the International Space Station. Most of that time was spent depressurizing the entire capsule and then restoring air to the cabin. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.
SpaceX sees the brief exercise as a starting point for testing spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.
This was Isaacman’s second charter flight with SpaceX, with two more to come as part of his personally funded space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first space flight in 2021, taking with him contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
For the recently completed Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of credit card processing company Shift4 shared costs with SpaceX. Isaacman declined to reveal how much he spent.
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