SpaceX returns to Earth for historic mission

The success is being touted as “a giant step” toward the colonization of Mars. This Sunday morning, the capsule of SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission successfully splashed down off the coast of Florida.

The teams of SpaceX went to recover the capsule and its four crew members, unharmed. This Thursday, these same four people, who are not professional astronauts, carried out the first private spacewalk.

Specifically, it was Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis who carried out the exit, while the other two, Scott Poteet and Anna Menon, remained inside the capsule, however the module did not have a decompression airlock, so they were all exposed to the vacuum of space.

This is the first time in human history that non-astronauts have performed such a maneuver. The mission was funded by billionaire Jared Isaacman. Polaris Dawn, the entire crew having undergone very intensive technical and physical training over the last few months.

Pour SpaceXit is a step in the commercial exploration of space. The mission allowed to test new space suits, but also to implement various automated systems that could be used by colonists sent to other planets, in particular Mars.

In addition, the mission also allowed the testing of laser communication between the capsule and the Starlink satellites, as well as around thirty other scientific experiments mainly focused on the impact of space travel on the human body.