‘Mission complete’: billionaire returns to Earth after spacewalk

A billionaire spacewalker returned to Earth with his crew on Sunday, ending a five-day trip that lifted them higher than anyone has travelled since Nasa’s moonwalkers.

SpaceX’s capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas in the predawn darkness, carrying the 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 (740km) above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble space telescope. Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 875 miles after Tuesday’s liftoff.

Isaacman became only the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the former Soviet Union achieved 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.

During Thursday’s commercial spacewalk, the Dragon capsule’s hatch was open barely half an hour. Isaacman emerged only up to his waist to briefly test SpaceX’s brand new spacesuit, followed by Gillis, who was knee-high as she flexed her arms and legs for several minutes. Gillis, a classically trained violinist, also performed in orbit earlier in the week.

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 programme named Polaris after the North Star. He paid an undisclosed sum for his first spaceflight in 2021, taking along contest winners and a paediatric cancer survivor while raising more than $250m for St Jude children’s research hospital.

For the just completed so-called Polaris Dawn mission, the founder and CEO of the Shift4 credit card processing company shared the cost with SpaceX. Isaacman will not divulge how much he spent.