Sept. 15 (UPI) — SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn early Sunday splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico after a five-day mission that included the world’s first commercial spacewalk and humans the farthest from Earth since the 1970s.
The Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronaut astronauts landed off the coast of Dry Tortugas, west of Key West, Fla., at 3:37 a.m. EDT Sunday.
REPLAY OF POLARIS DAWN RETURN TO EARTH
The astronauts left Earth on Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. On Wednesday, they orbited at an altitude of 870 miles above Earth, the most since Apollo 17 went to the moon in 1972. NASA’s Gemini 11 mission in 1966 reached 853 miles.
To safely reach Earth, the capsule carried out a “de-orbit burn,” orienting itself to go through the thickest part of Earth’s atmosphere.
The spacecraft encountered up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. They were protected by the Crew Dragon’s heat shield on the bottom of the 13-foot-wide capsule.
It slowed down to slow before four parachutes were deployed to that further slow its descent.
After hitting the ocean, the spacecraft briefly bobbed around in the water before rescue crews arrived and moved onto a special boat, referred to as the “Dragon’s nest.”
The crew consisted of mission commander Jared Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of the finance company Shift4 Payments; former US Air Force pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet; and SpaceX operations engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.
“SpaceX, back at home we have a lot of work to do, but from here it looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said while standing outside the Dragon staring back at Earth.
Gillis, who also was in a spacewalk, and Menon became the first women to fly so far from Earth.
Because the Dragon spacecraft does not have an airlock, the entire interior was exposed to the vacuum of space during the spacewalk. They worse special spacesuits.
In November 2020, Isaacman funded a trip that saw him and three crewmates circle Earth for three days as part of a fundraiser for childhood cancer research.
