U.S Tech billionaire entrepreneur, Jared Isaacman has returned to Earth with his crew, ending a five-day trip that lifted them higher than anyone has traveled since NASA’s moonwalkers.
SpaceX’s capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico in Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the early morning darkness of Sunday, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers, and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot.
They conducted the first private spacewalk while orbiting at 460 miles (740 kilometers) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Following the launch on Tuesday, their spacecraft reached a high height of 875 miles (1,408 kilometers).
Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union scored the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis the 265th.
Until now, all spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.
It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 70 miles (113 kilometers) west of Key West.
To celebrate the new location, SpaceX employees brought a big, green turtle balloon to Mission Control at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually targets 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 barely a half-hour.
Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand new spacesuit.
The spacewalk lasted less than two hours, considerably shorter than those at the International Space Station.
Most of that time was needed to depressurise 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 ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris after the North Star.
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