After conducting the first-ever commercial spacewalk and travelling farther from Earth than anyone in more than half a century, the astronauts of the Polaris Dawn mission returned to Earth safely early on Sunday.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Florida, shortly after 3.30am, carrying Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, and his crew of three private astronauts, according to a SpaceX livestream.
The ambitious space mission, a collaboration between Isaacman and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, spent five days in orbit, achieved several milestones in private spaceflight and was further evidence that space travel and spacewalks are no longer the exclusive domain of professional astronauts working at government agencies like Nasa.
The Crew Dragon capsule launched on Tuesday, after delays because of a helium leak and bad weather. On board were Isaacman, the mission commander and the founder of the payment services company Shift4; Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, SpaceX employees; and Scott Poteet, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel.
Late on Tuesday, its orbit reached a high point of about 870 miles above the Earth’s surface. That beat the record distance for astronauts on a mission not headed to the moon, which the Gemini XI mission set in 1966 at 853 miles high, and made Gillis and Menon the first women ever to fly so far from Earth.
On Thursday, Isaacman and Gillis became the first private astronauts to complete a spacewalk. The operation involved the crew letting all the air out of the spacecraft, because it had no airlock, while the other two crew members wore spacesuits inside the airless capsule.
New York Times News Service