A billionaire astronaut and his crew have safely returned to Earth after participating in the first-ever private spacewalk.
The Polaris Dawn mission, led by SpaceX on behalf of billionaire Jared Isaacman, splashed down at 8:37 am UK time in the Gulf of Mexico, near Florida’s Dry Tortugas, during local nighttime hours.
The mission carried four private citizens, including SpaceX engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis. Their journey began on Tuesday when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched them into orbit, where they spent five days circling the Earth.
“We are mission complete,” Isaacman radioed as their capsule floated in the water, awaiting recovery.
In a SpaceX video, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman was seen exiting the capsule after the successful landing. While in orbit, Isaacman became the 264th person to conduct a spacewalk, a rare feat previously reserved for professional astronauts from various countries.
The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was described as a “highly risky mission,” with the crew orbiting nearly 460 miles (740 km) above Earth—higher than both the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope.
Isaacman, who founded Shift4 Payments at age 16 and is now worth an estimated $1.9 billion (£1.45 billion), has embarked on multiple space missions. This was his second chartered flight with SpaceX, with two more planned under his personally funded space exploration initiative, Polaris, named after the North Star.
In his first mission in 2021, Isaacman paid an undisclosed sum for a flight that took contest winners and a pediatric cancer survivor into space, raising millions for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. For Polaris Dawn, the costs were shared with SpaceX, though the amount remains undisclosed.
During the spacewalk, Isaacman commented, “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”
The crew wore SpaceX’s new spacewalking suits, a key objective of the mission being to test their functionality.
The Polaris Dawn crew, consisting of mission specialists Anna Menon, pilot Scott Kidd Poteet, commander Jared Isaacman, and Sarah Gillis, performed launch day rehearsals at the Kennedy Space Center before their historic journey.
During the spacewalk, two crew members stepped outside the Dragon capsule for around 15 minutes, performing stretches and movements to evaluate the new suits, while the other two remained inside, monitoring vital support systems throughout the mission.