Sept. 15 (UPI) — SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn touched down in the Gulf of Mexico early Sunday morning after a five-day mission that included the launch of the Polaris Dawn spacecraft. first commercial spacewalk and humans are the furthest away from Earth since the 1970s.
The Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts landed Sunday at 3:37 a.m. EDT off the coast of Dry Tortugas, west of Key West, Florida.
POLARIS DAWN REPETITION RETURN TO EARTH
The astronauts left Earth on Tuesday from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. On Wednesday, they orbited 870 miles above Earth, the highest altitude since Apollo 17 went to the moon in 1972. NASA’s Gemini 11 mission in 1966 reached 853 miles.
To reach Earth safely, the capsule performed a de-orbit burn, orienting the capsule to pass through the thickest part of Earth’s atmosphere.
The spacecraft encountered temperatures of 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit. They were protected by the Crew Dragon heat shield on the underside of the 13-foot-wide capsule.
The aircraft slowed to the point where four parachutes were deployed to further slow the descent.
After hitting the ocean, the spacecraft drifted in the water for a while until rescuers arrived and boarded a special boat called the “Dragon’s Nest.”
The crew included mission commander Jared Isaacman, the billionaire CEO of financial company Shift4 Payments; former U.S. Air Force pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet; and SpaceX operations engineers Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis.
“SpaceX, we still have a lot of work to do back home, but from here the world looks perfect,” Isaacman said as he stood outside the Dragon and stared at Earth.
Gillis, who also performed a spacewalk, and Menon were 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 have worse special spacesuits.
November 2020Isaacman funded a voyage in which he and three crew members traveled around the Earth for three days as part of a fundraising effort for childhood cancer research.
