Billionaire industrialist and astronaut Jared Isaacman has returned safely to Earth with his team. His five-day journey ended with a landing on the Dry Tortugas coast of Florida early Sunday.
With this, he has become the astronaut to travel at the highest altitude after the lunar travelers. He did the first private spacewalk about 740 km above the Earth. This height is much higher than the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope. The mission was launched on Tuesday from the Falcon-9 rocket of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX. In this mission, the height of the orbit in which Jared Isaacman, pilot Kid Poteat, mission specialist Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon went was 1,408.1 km. No astronaut has gone to this height for more than 50 years. Isaacman became the 264th person to do so since the first spacewalk was conducted by the former Soviet Union in 1965. SpaceX’s Sarah Gillis is listed at number 265 on this list. Till now all the spacewalks were done by professional astronauts.
Their capsule entered the Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of about 27 thousand km per hour. Due to friction in the air, its temperature reached 1900 degrees Celsius, but the heat shield placed below it kept the astronauts safe. As the capsule came down, its speed was slowed down. Later the parachutes were opened and the landing took place in water. Later they were brought to the ground through a boat.
The Polaris Dawn mission was to be launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on August 27. But it had to be postponed till August due to leakage of helium. The next day SpaceX gave information on the social media platform SpaceX that the mission is being delayed again due to predictions of bad weather on the coast of Florida. Then, Isaacman had said that bad weather has a hand in the delay of our mission. We should be completely sure about the weather before launching. Right now the conditions are not favorable tonight or tomorrow, so we will keep an eye every day. As Elon Musk mentioned, Polaris Dawn is a challenging mission with important objectives, so we will wait for the best opportunity to ensure success.
