The Polaris Dawn crew has returned safely to the Earth. The SpaceX Dragon capsule that carried the four-member crew on a historic mission splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas around 03:37 local time (07:37 GMT). “Welcome back to earth,” posted SpaceX on X, formerly known as Twitter. The splashdown was live-streamed by SpaceX on YouTube.
The capsule hatch was opened around 4:20 am local time after a recovery ship lifted the capsule.
Dragon and the Polaris Dawn crew splash down off the coast of Florida, completing the @PolarisProgram‘s first human spaceflight mission pic.twitter.com/Sobt66zxnL
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 15, 2024
The Polaris Dawn mission was launched in SpaceX Dragon spacecraft atop SpaceX’s partially reusable rocket, the Falcon 9, on September 10 at 5:23 a.m. EDT (0923 GMT) from Launch Complex-39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre (KSC) after multiple delays due to helium leaks and bad weather conditions.
The first private spacewalk was carried out on September 12 by tech billionaires Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis. During the spacewalk, the whole crew was exposed to the space vacuum for about an hour as the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft lacked an airlock system. The spacewalk was carried out in new spaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits, which are an upgraded version of the intravehicular (IVA) spacesuit.
SpaceX and the Polaris Dawn crew have completed the first commercial spacewalk!
“SpaceX, back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.” — Mission Commander @rookisaacman during Dragon egress and seeing our planet from ~738 km pic.twitter.com/lRczSv5i4k
— Polaris (@PolarisProgram) September 12, 2024
The spacewalk was funded by billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman. The mission crew included SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis, Anna Menon, and Scott Kidd, a former United States Air Force pilot.
The Polaris Dawn crew broke many previous human spaceflight records. Mr. Isaacman and Ms. Gillis became the first humans to carry out a private spacewalk; Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon became the first women to travel so far in space; Sarah Gillis became the first person to play a violin in space and the crew became the first to travel further than any other astronaut in a more than 50-year span after the Apollo missions and the first to test Starlink laser-based communications in space.
The crew travelled into an oval-shaped orbit high enough to plunge the vehicle and crew into the Van Allen radiation belts, which are located about 700 km from the Earth.
