Jewish-American billionaire and tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman returned to Earth on Sunday morning after becoming the first civilian to conduct a spacewalk.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon craft landed in the Gulf of Mexico near the Dry Tortugas island shortly after 3:30 am local time. The craft had spent five days in space, venturing father out into the final frontier than any human had traveled in five decades.
Isaacman, the founder and CEO of payment processing company Shift4, conducted the spacewalk on Thursday in what has been called a milestone for private space exploration. While he is the 264th person to conduct a spacewalk outside of a vessel, he is the first to do so who was not a trained astronaut.
The spacealk was livestreamed to the world and lasted about two hours in total. The purpose was to test SpaceX's new spacesuits in preparation for future missions to Mars.
The New York Post reported that Issacman said upon leaving the craft, “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do, but from here, Earth sure looks like a perfect world.”
Upon landing back on Earth, Isaacman announced, "We are mission complete." He and the rest of the crew waited an hour for the recovery team to arrive and bring them back to terra firma.
This was Isaacman's second trip to space with SpaceX. In 2021 he became the first civilian to orbit Earth without a professional astronaught onboard the craft. He has purchased two more flights chartered with the company.