CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day journey that took them higher than anyone since NASA’s moonwalkers.
The SpaceX capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico near the Dry Tortugas in Florida in the pre-dawn darkness, carrying 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 maximum altitude of 878 miles (1,408 kilometers) after liftoff on Tuesday.
Isaacman became 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 were performed by professional astronauts.
“Mission accomplished,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the rescue team. Within an hour, all four had emerged from the spacecraft and were pumping their fists in glee as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.
It was the first time SpaceX had aimed to land near the Dry Tortugas, a group of islands 70 miles west of Key West. To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a giant balloon shaped like a green sea turtle to Mission Control at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company typically aims closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.
During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open for just a half-hour. Isaacman emerged, his body covered to the waist, to briefly test SpaceX’s new spacesuit, followed by Gillis, who 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, considerably less than those conducted on the International Space Station. Most of that time was spent depressurizing the entire capsule and then restoring cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, were wearing 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, and he has two more to go under his personally funded space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, carrying 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 the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won’t disclose how much he spent.
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