A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day trip that lifted them higher than anyone has traveled since NASA's moonwalkers. SpaceX's capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida's Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers, and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot. They pulled off the first private spacewalk while orbiting nearly 460 miles above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 875 miles following Tuesday's liftoff, the AP reports.
On Thursday, 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. "We are mission complete," Isaacman radioed as the capsule bobbed in the water, awaiting the recovery team. Within an hour, all four were out of the spacecraft, pumping their fists with joy as they emerged onto the ship's deck. It was the first time SpaceX aimed for a splashdown near the Dry Tortugas, a cluster of islands 70 miles west of Key West. The company usually targets closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere.
This was Isaacman's second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more ahead under his personally financed space exploration program named Polaris, after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, per the AP, taking along contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250 million for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. For the just-completed Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card-processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman won't divulge how much he spent.
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