A billionaire space traveler and his team have safely returned to Earth after a five-day journey that took them higher than any NASA moonwalkers have gone before. The crew, which included tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers, and a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot, landed in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s Dry Tortugas. Their private spacewalk occurred approximately 460 miles above Earth, surpassing the altitudes of the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope with a peak altitude reaching 875 miles following their liftoff earlier in the week.
Isaacman and SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis made history as the 264th and 265th individuals to conduct a spacewalk, a task previously reserved for professional astronauts since the first spacewalk by the former Soviet Union in 1965. The successful mission concluded with the crew joyfully exiting the spacecraft as it bobbed in the water, marking the first SpaceX splashdown near Dry Tortugas, west of Key West.
During the commercial spacewalk, which lasted less than two hours, Isaacman and Gillis tested SpaceX’s new spacesuits while orbiting Earth. The brief exercise serves as a stepping stone to advance spacesuit technology for future long-duration missions, possibly to Mars. Isaacman, who financed the mission under his Polaris space exploration program, kept details of the cost undisclosed. This flight was his second with SpaceX, with two more planned as part of the Polaris initiative.
The crew’s return to Earth aboard the SpaceX capsule near the Dry Tortugas marked a successful and historic milestone in private space exploration.
