The billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, completing a five-day journey that took them higher than anyone since NASA's moon rovers.
A SpaceX capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida's Dry Tortugas in the pre-dawn darkness. On board were tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former U.S. Air Force Thunderbird pilot.
They performed the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 450 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft reached a peak altitude of 885 miles (1,408 kilometers) after liftoff on Tuesday.
Isaacman became just the 264th person to conduct a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union conducted the first spacewalk in 1965, and SpaceX's Sarah Gillies became the 265th. Until now, all spacewalks have been performed by professional astronauts.
“Mission accomplished,” Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed on the water, awaiting a rescue team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spacecraft, fists pumping in joy as they emerged onto the ship’s deck.
It was the first time SpaceX had planned a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a group of islands 70 miles 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 closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.
SpaceX made history after its Polaris Dawn mission successfully took a crew of civilian astronauts farther into space than anyone had in 50 years, while tech billionaire Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillies performed the first civilian spacewalk.
During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open for just half an hour. Isaacman emerged only waist-deep to briefly test SpaceX’s new spacesuit, followed by Gillies, who was at knee level, flexing her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillies, a classically trained violinist, also performed in orbit earlier in the week.
The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than the International Space Station. Much of that time was spent depressurizing the entire capsule and then restoring the cabin's air. Even Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet of SpaceX, who remained strapped in, were wearing spacesuits.
SpaceX sees the brief exercise as a starting point for testing spacesuit technologies for future, longer missions to Mars.
It was Isaacman’s second charter flight with SpaceX, with two more flights still to come as part of his personally funded space exploration program, named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed amount for his first spaceflight in 2021, carrying contest winners and a child cancer survivor and raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
For the just-completed Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of credit card processing company Shift4 split the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won't disclose how much he spent.