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A billionaire spacewalker and his crew returned to Earth on Sunday, ending a five-day journey that took them higher than anyone since NASA’s moonwalkers.
The SpaceX capsule landed in the early morning darkness in the Gulf of Mexico, near Dry Tortugas, Florida. On board were tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.
They conducted the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 875 miles (1,408 kilometers) after Tuesday’s launch.
Isaacman became only the 264th person to conduct a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis became the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks have been conducted by professional astronauts.
“We’re mission-ready,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, waiting for the rescue team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, fists pumping in joy as they appeared on the ship’s deck.
It was the first time SpaceX had targeted a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a group of islands 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees flew a large green turtle balloon into Mission Control at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually aims closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of bad weather forced SpaceX to look elsewhere.
SpaceX has made history after its Polaris Dawn mission successfully flew a civilian astronaut crew farther into space than ever before in 50 years. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis conducted the first civilian spacewalk.
During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open for barely half an hour. Isaacman emerged only waist-deep to briefly test SpaceX’s brand-new spacesuit, followed by Gillis, who came up to her knees and moved her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also performed in space earlier in the week.
The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than the one on the International Space Station. Most of that time was spent depressurizing the entire capsule and then replenishing the cabin air. 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 chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more flights planned under his personally funded space exploration program called Polaris, to the North Star. He paid an undisclosed amount for his first space flight in 2021, which took contest winners and a childhood cancer survivor along with it and raised more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
For the just-completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of credit card processing company Shift4 split the costs with SpaceX. Isaacman would not disclose how much he spent.
