Historic private astronaut mission ends with splashdown off Florida

AFP | Washington, United States

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

The Dragon spacecraft plunged into the ocean at 3:37 am (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 onto the recovery vessel half a 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.

A helicopter was due to transport them to land. “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 Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center, 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 870 miles (1,400 kilometers) -- more than three times higher than the International Space Station and the furthest humans had ever traveled from Earth since the Apollo missions to the Moon.

Then on Thursday, with their Dragon spacecraft’s orbit brought down to 434 miles, 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.