Cape Canaveral, Florida – The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission made history when its crew, composed of non-government astronauts, successfully completed a spacewalk.
The mission concluded early Sunday with the Dragon spacecraft splashing down off Florida’s coast at 3:37 AM. A recovery team quickly retrieved the capsule and crew in the pre-dawn darkness. The spacecraft was lifted onto a recovery ship about 30 minutes after landing.
Following brief medical checks, SpaceX engineer Anna Menon, smiling and waving, was the first to exit, followed by engineer Sarah Gillis, pilot Scott Poteet, and mission commander Jared Isaacman. They were then transported to land by helicopter.
The four-person team, led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, launched from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday and traveled deeper into space than anyone in the last 50 years, reaching the Van Allen radiation belt.
At their peak, they hit an altitude of 870 miles, three times higher than the International Space Station, making it the furthest humans have ventured since the Apollo missions.
On Thursday, at a lower altitude of 434 miles, Isaacman opened the hatch of the Dragon spacecraft and performed a spacewalk, holding onto a structure called “Skywalker” with a spectacular view of Earth behind him. He later swapped places with SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis, who tested the mobility of the next-generation spacesuits.
Since Dragon lacks an airlock, the entire crew was exposed to space while Isaacman and Gillis performed the tasks. Menon and Poteet monitored the spacecraft systems from inside.
NASA’s Bill Nelson hailed the Polaris Dawn mission as a “giant leap forward” for commercial space exploration, with SpaceX continuing to lead the charge in space travel.
After the spacewalk, the crew conducted approximately 40 scientific experiments, including testing the effects of space missions on human health. They also used SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to send a high-resolution video of Gillis playing the violin in space.
Polaris Dawn is the first of three planned missions under the Polaris program, a partnership between Isaacman and SpaceX. The final mission is expected to feature the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Starship, a next-generation rocket crucial for Elon Musk’s Mars colonization plans.
