Jared Isaacman returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, concluding a five-day journey that took them farther than anyone has traveled since NASA’s moonwalkers.
SpaceX’s capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the early morning hours, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers, and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.
They completed the spacewalk while orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 875 miles (1,408 kilometers) after launching on Tuesday.
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 the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks were conducted by professional astronauts.
“We are mission complete,” Isaacman communicated via radio as the capsule floated in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, expressing their joy with raised fists as they stepped onto the ship’s deck.
This was the first time SpaceX 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 brought a large, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company typically aims for a landing closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of unfavorable weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to search for an alternative location.
During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open for just over half an hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s new spacesuit followed by Gillis, who stood knee-high 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, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station. Most of that time was required to depressurize the entire capsule and then restore the cabin air. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained strapped in, wore spacesuits.
SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.
This was Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more still planned under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
For the recently completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman will not disclose how much he spent.
