A white spaceship, lightly toasted like a marshmallow and smelling of burnt metal, fell from the night sky early Sunday morning and landed in the Gulf of Mexico near Key West.
The dim waters there were carefully selected from dozens of potential landing sites near Florida. This is because the wind and sea were predicted to be particularly placid and serene, as the Crew Dragon spacecraft was named Resistance floated out to sea and rocked gently, waiting for the arrival of a rescue ship.
Inside waited a crew of four — commander Jared Isaacman, the billionaire who bankrolled the mission and had just completed his second private spaceflight; SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, who were the company’s first female employees to fly into orbit; and pilot Kidd Poteet.
They were ecstatic to be back home.
“Mission accomplished,” Isaacman said after the spacecraft landed.
A significant success
Their mission, certainly the most ambitious private spaceflight to date, was a complete success. The mission, called Polaris Dawn, reached an altitude of 1,408.1 kilometers on its first day of flight. It was the highest orbital mission ever flown, and the farthest humans have traveled from our planet since the Apollo missions more than half a century ago.
Photo: SpaceX/Getty Images
Then, on the third day of the flight, the four crew members donned spacesuits designed and developed over the past two years. After releasing the cabin atmosphere into space, first Isaacman and then Gillis spent several minutes pulling their bodies out of the Dragon spacecraft. It was the first private spacewalk in history.
Although this space expedition largely replicated what the Soviet Union, and then the United States, had done in the mid-1960s with tethered spacewalks, it was nonetheless significant. These commercial spacesuits cost a fraction of what government spacesuits cost and could be considered version 1.0 of the suits that could one day allow multiple humans to walk in space, on the Moon, and eventually on Mars.
Finally, on the last full day of the mission in space, the Dragon spacecraft demonstrated connectivity to the Starlink satellite grid in low Earth orbit. The crew held a 40-minute, uninterrupted video call with flight operators at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. During that time, according to the company, Dragon maintained contact via laser links with the Starlink satellites through 16 firings of the spacecraft’s Draco engines.
This test proved the feasibility of using thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit to provide high-speed Internet to people and spacecraft.
Wait, isn’t this just a billionaire ride?
Some people misunderstood the mission. They saw Isaacman as a fintech billionaire satisfying his desire for space travel in a manned spacecraft built by Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX. It seemed like a rollercoaster ride for the ultra-rich and celebrated—for those who couldn’t satisfy their thrill cravings with the pleasures available on planet Earth.
I understand this point of view, but I do not share it.