A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day journey that lifted them higher than anyone has traveled since Nasa’s moonwalkers.
SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the predawn darkness in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas, with tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.
They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 km) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak of 875 miles after Tuesday’s liftoff.
Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union achieved the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis became the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks have been done by professional astronauts.
“We’re mission accomplished,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule floated in the water, awaiting the recovery team.
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 new spacesuit, followed by Gillis, who was knee-high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also performed in orbit earlier this week.
The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, significantly shorter than that at the International Space Station. Most of that time was needed to pressurize the entire capsule and then restore cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who stayed strapped in, wore spacesuits.
SpaceX sees the short exercise as a starting point for testing spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.
This was Isaacman’s second leased flight with SpaceX, with two more to come under his personally funded space exploration program called Polaris, in addition to the North Star. He paid an undisclosed amount for his first space flight in 2021, taking competition winners and a pediatric cancer survivor with him while raising more than $250 million for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
For the just-completed Polaris Dawn mission, Isaacman, the founder and CEO of credit card processing company Shift4, shared the cost with SpaceX. He would not disclose how much he spent.
