WASHINGTON: The SpaceX Polaris Dawn mission, which made history when its crew conducted the first spacewalk by non-government astronauts, concluded early on Sunday with a splashdown off the coast of Florida.

The Dragon spacecraft plunged into the ocean at 3:37am (0737 GMT), a webcast of the arrival showed, with a recovery team deploying in the pre-dawn darkness to retrieve the capsule and crew.

The capsule was lifted from the water and put onto the recovery vessel half an hour later.

After brief medical checks, a smiling and waving SpaceX engineer Anna Menon was the first of the crew to exit, followed by engineer Sarah Gillis, pilot Scott Poteet and commander Jared Isaacman.

Led by Isaacman, four-member team hit a peak altitude of 1,400km

“Happy, healthy, home,” the Polaris Program wrote on X. “A new era of commercial spaceflight dawns, with much more to come.”

The four-member team led by fintech billionaire Isaacman launched on Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Centre, quickly journeying deeper into the cosmos than any humans in the past half century as they ventured into the dangerous Van Allen radiation belt.

They hit a peak altitude of 1,400km — more than three times higher than the International Space Station and the furthest humans had ever travelled from Earth since the Apollo missions to the Moon.

Then on Thursday, with their Dragon spacecraft’s orbit brought down to 698km, Isaacman swung open the hatch and climbed out into the void, gripping a structure called “Skywalker” as a breathtaking view of Earth unfolded before him.

“SpaceX, back at home we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world,” he told mission control in Hawthorne, California, where teams erupted in applause.

He went back inside after a few minutes and was replaced by a second astronaut, SpaceX engineer Gillis, who, like Isaacman, performed a series of mobility tests on SpaceX’s sleek, next-generation suits.

Since Dragon doesn’t have an airlock, the entire crew were exposed to the vacuum of space. Mission pilot Poteet and SpaceX engineer Menon remained strapped in throughout as they monitored vital support systems.

It marked a “giant leap forward” for the commercial space industry, said NASA chief Bill Nelson, as well as another triumphant achievement for SpaceX.

Founded in 2002, the company has quickly outpaced its legacy competitors, now thriving as one of NASA’s prime contractors — thanks in large part to owner and CEO Elon Musk’s fervent drive to colonise Mars.

Rousing violin solo

Since completing their extravehicular activity, the crew have continued to carry out roughly 40 science experiments — for example, inserting endoscopic cameras through their noses and into their throats to image their airways and better understand the impact of long-duration space missions on human health.

They also demonstrated connectivity with SpaceX’s Starlink internet satellite constellation by sending back to ground control a high-resolution video of Gillis playing “Rey’s Theme” by “Star Wars” composer John Williams, on the violin.

Polaris Dawn is the first of three missions under the Polaris program, a collaboration between Isaacman and SpaceX.

Financial terms of the partnership remain under wraps but Isaacman, the 41-year-old founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, reportedly poured $200 million of his own money into leading the 2021 all-civilian SpaceX Inspiration4 orbital mission.

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2024