CAPE CANAVERAL — A billionaire returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day trip that took them higher than anyone traveled since NASA’s moon walkers. The SpaceX capsule splashed into the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the pre-dawn darkness, carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot. They have embarked on the first private spacewalk as they orbit nearly 740 kilometers above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. Their spacecraft reached a maximum altitude of 875 miles (1,408 kilometers) after Tuesday’s launch. Isaacman became only the 264th person to walk into space since the former Soviet Union achieved the first in 1965, and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis 265. Until now, all spacewalks have been carried out by professional astronauts. “Mission accomplished,” Isaacman radioed as the cabin bobbed in the water, waiting for the rescue team. Within an hour, all four were out of their spaceship, pumping their fists in glee as they surfaced aboard the ship. It was the first time SpaceX had targeted a launch 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 large green turtle balloon to Mission Control at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The company usually heads closer to the Florida coast, but two weeks of poor weather forecasts have prompted SpaceX to look elsewhere. During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open for barely half an hour. Isaacman emerged waist-high to briefly test SpaceX’s brand new space suit, followed by Gillis, who was knee-deep and flexing her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also performed in orbit earlier in the week. The ascent into space lasted less than two hours, considerably less time than those on the International Space Station. Most of the time was needed to depressurize the entire capsule and then restore the air in the cabin. Even SpaceX’s Anna Menon and Scott “Kidd” Poteet, who remained tethered, wore spacesuits. SpaceX sees this short exercise as a starting point for testing spacesuit technology for future longer missions to Mars. This was Isaacman’s second charter flight with SpaceX, with two more to come as part of his personally funded space exploration program called Polaris after the North Star. It paid an undisclosed amount for its first space flight in 2021, took a competition winner and a pediatric cancer survivor with it, and raised more than $250 million for the Children’s Research Hospital of St. Jude. For the just-completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of credit card processing company Shift4 shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman would not say how much he spent.
