SpaceX is bringing the four crew members of Polaris Dawn with a planned splashdown landing off the coast of Florida early Sunday.
The Crew Dragon Resilience which launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday is slated to land at 3:36 a.m. off the coast of the Dry Tortugas in the Gulf of Mexico.
It will mark the completion of the five-day orbital trip taken by billionaire Jared Isaacman and his crewmates Scott Poteet, Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon. The quartet launched from Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday on the first of up to three missions as part of the Polaris Program, a partnership between SpaceX and Isaacman, who was making his second trip to space after 2021's Inspiration4 mission.
As part of the partnership, Isaacman's trips are designed to test out innovations for SpaceX, and both Gillis and Menon became the first SpaceX employees to fly to space.
Billionaire, SpaceX employee crewmate make history with 1st commercial spacewalk
The highlight of the trip has been the first commercial spacewalk, which Isaacman and Gillis performed on Thursday with each venturing outside the Crew Dragon Resilience for a little more than 10 minutes each while connected with a 12-foot-long tether.
Since the Crew Dragon does not have an airlock, the entire spacecraft's atmosphere had to be vented while all four crew members wore SpaceX's new extravehicular activity (EVA) suits. After Isaacman and Gillis performed their spacewalks, they had to repressurize the Crew Dragon and confirm the hatch was sealed tight before taking off the suits.
Otherwise, they would have had to make an emergency landing with all four wearing the EVA suits for protection.
All went well, though, and they're now headed home
Other feats accomplished on the mission including flying Dragon to 870 miles altitude and breaking a low-Earth orbit record for a crewed mission set in 1966, when NASA astronauts Pete Conrad and Richard Gordon flew on the Gemini 11 mission to 853 miles.
While the Apollo moon missions flew to farther distances away from Earth, those were not low-Earth orbit missions. The point of going to the altitude was to subject the spacecraft to the more volatile radiation and cosmic rays found in the Van Allen radiation belt as part of Earth's magnetosphere.
This gives SpaceX more information to help it design spacecraft for deeper space missions, such as those that will be needed to achieve the company's goal of creating a colony on Mars.
Polaris Dawn also tested out laser-based communication between an on-board Starlink setup and satellites already in orbit as part of the SpaceX's massive constellation.
And the crew also performed 36 research studies and experiments among 31 partner institutions.
The splashdown marks the completion of the third mission for Resilience and what would be the 13th return flight for Dragon with humans on board.
Sister spacecraft Crew Dragon Endeavour, amidst its fleet-leading fifth flight, should be next in less than a month when it completes the Crew-8 mission returning home from the International Space Station.
It's awaiting the launch of the next Crew Dragon, targeting liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as early as Sept. 24. The Crew Dragon Freedom, heading up for flight No. 4, is taking up only two instead of four passengers so that the two NASA astronauts that flew up to the ISS on board Boeing Starliner, but didn't fly home when it landed last week, will be able to get a ride home.
That won't happen until next February at the end of the Crew-9's six-month stay on board.
SpaceX has one other private mission on tap this year called Fram2 that is taking its four passengers on a polar orbital flight.
In early 2025, it has both the Crew-10 flight and the Axiom Space Ax-4 flight headed to the ISS.