A billionaire spacewalker has touched back down to Earth after five days in orbit higher than any human since NASA went to the moon.
SpaceX’s capsule parachuted down before making a splashdown off the coast of Florida shortly after 3.37am carrying tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, two SpaceX engineers and a former air force pilot.
“We are mission complete,” Isaacman was heard saying over the radio as he floated in the Gulf of Mexico.
The event was livestreamed by SpaceX, which said on X: “Splashdown of Dragon confirmed! Welcome back to Earth”.
The crew pulled off the first private spacewalk on Thursday while orbiting nearly 460 miles above Earth, higher than the International Space Station and Hubble Space Telescope.
Their spacecraft hit a peak altitude of 875 miles following Tuesday’s lift-off.
Mr Isaacman became the 264th person to perform a spacewalk since the first by the former Soviet Union in 1965, with SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis undertaking the 265th during the most recent trip. Until now, all spacewalks have been done by professional astronauts.
In a live feed relayed back to Earth on Thursday, Mr Isaacman could be heard saying: “Back at home we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”
Staff at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, cheered and applauded as Mr Isaacman left the capsule for his spacewalk.
The commercial spacewalk was the main focus of the five-day flight financed by Mr Isaacman and Space X, which is owned by fellow billionaire Elon Musk.
After completing a series of manoeuvres, Mr Isaacman returned to the Dragon spacecraft, to make way for mission specialist Sarah Gillis to perform the same series of actions and close the hatch after returning to the cabin herself.
The four members of the Polaris Dawn crew wore SpaceX’s new spacewalking suits to protect themselves, and a main aim of the mission was to test these suits.
The spacewalkers – who had around 15 minutes outside – climbed up through the hatch and, while still tethered to the spacecraft with their feet remaining inside, carried out a series of stretches to test the spacesuit.
Mission pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet and mission specialist and medical officer Anna Menon stayed in their seats and monitored vital support systems throughout the operation.
SpaceX considers the brief exercise a starting point to test spacesuit technology for future, longer missions to Mars.
This was Mr Isaacman’s second chartered flight with SpaceX, with another two planned 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 millions for St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Mr Isaacman, the founder and chief executive of the Shift4 credit card-processing company, has not divulged how much he spent on the most recent mission.