A SpaceX crew, Polaris Dawn, comes home after an orbital odyssey with a five-day mission topped by history’s first-ever commercial spacewalk. They splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
At 3:37 a.m. ET Sunday, the Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying four astronauts touched down off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Fla.
No human has risen to a higher altitude in five decades than the one reached by the Polaris Dawn mission. A spacewalk in the early hours on Thursday morning was for the first time such feat achieved by a privately funded and operated mission.
However, returning to Earth may be the most dangerous part of any space mission.
The spaceships oriented while safely travelling home on a “de-orbit burn” performed by the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Related Posts
The pressure and friction from slamming into the air, still racing at roughly 17,000 miles an hour, then caused the spacecraft to heat up to as high as 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,900 degrees Celsius. The Crew Dragon’s heat shield, located at the bottom of the 13-foot-wide, 4-meter-wide capsule, would have kept the crew at a reasonable temperature, however.
It first slowed down by just dragging against the air, then deployed its parachutes, which decreased the vehicle’s rate of descent.
Once it reaches the ocean, it will bounce in the water for a period of time as rescue workers in the area get ready to pull it out onto a special ship called the “Dragon’s Nest.” There will be final checks on safety before the crew can leave the capsule and return to the mainland.
Iconic Flight
He is joined by his close friend and former US Air Force pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a millionaire CEO of Shift4 Payments. Mission commander Jared Isaacman and SpaceX operations engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis round out the crew for Polaris Dawn.
First up, that four-person team set a new altitude mark on their inaugural flight, with a high point as lofty as 870 miles, set by NASA’s Gemini 11 mission as the highest Earth orbit ever reached by humans.
When Gillis and Menon reached, the crew’s apogee-or the furthest point from the planet-they were the first women to travel thus far from Earth.
Likewise, during the apogee, the farthest distance the human journey has reached since NASA terminated the Apollo Program in 1972 was attained.
Afterwards, the spacewalk was conducted by the Crew Dragon capsule by lowering its altitude.
The high-risk event, technically called an extravehicular activity or EVAFully, depressurized the Crew Dragon capsule before Isaacman opened the hatch to expose the crew to space vacuum.
After about ten minutes, which gave each a feel for how the EVA suits performed, Gillis went back inside the Crew Dragon ship and closed the hatch.
The spacewalk seemed to go without any significant issues. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman wrote after his first peek outside the spaceship.
For the rest of their stay in orbit, the crew worked on nearly forty scientific experiments and studies, including a number aimed at continuing to investigate space adaption syndrome, a form of motion sickness related to microgravity.
Gillis, an experienced violinist who took her instrument with her on the journey, played Rey’s theme from “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Gillis’ tune was beamed back to Earth over SpaceX’s Starlink system, showing off the satellite network’s ability to deliver internet access in orbit.
She also read her coauthored book, “Kisses From Space,” as a fundraiser for her family and a group of patients from the St. Jude Children’s Hospital.
The specific Crew Dragon capsule powering the Polaris Dawn mission will have completed its third voyage to orbit with Sunday’s expected return.
Crew-1 is the spaceship that the NASA astronauts christened “Resilience” as they launched on their maiden space voyage back in November 2020. It flew the mission Inspiration 4 this year. During that voyage, which Isaacman funded, he and his three crew members circled the planet for three days to gather money for research on juvenile cancer.
