The Polaris Dawn Spaceflight Was More Than Just a Billionaire Joyride

A white spacecraft, lightly toasted like a marshmallow and smelling of singed metal, fell out of the night sky early on Sunday morning and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico not all that far from Key West.

The darkened waters there were carefully chosen from among dozens of potential landing spots near Florida. This is because the wind and seas were predicted to be especially calm and serene as the Crew Dragon spacecraft named Resilience floated down to the sea and bobbed gently, awaiting the arrival of a recovery ship.

Inside waited a crew of four—commander Jared Isaacman, a billionaire who funded the mission and had just completed his second private spaceflight; SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, who were the company’s first employees to fly into orbit; and pilot Kidd Poteet.

They were happy to be home.

“We are mission complete,” Isaacman said after the spacecraft landed.

A Significant Success

Their mission, certainly the most ambitious private spaceflight to date, was a total success. Named Polaris Dawn, the mission flew to an altitude of 1,408.1 kilometers on the first day of the flight. This was the highest Earth-orbit mission ever flown and the farthest humans have traveled from our planet since the Apollo missions more than half a century ago.

Photograph: SpaceX/Getty Images

Then, on the third day of the flight, the four crew members donned space suits designed and developed within the past two years. After venting the cabin’s atmosphere into space, first Isaacman, and then Gillis, spent several minutes extending their bodies out of the Dragon spacecraft. This was the first-ever private spacewalk in history.

Although this foray into space largely repeated what the Soviet Union, and then the United States, performed in the mid-1960s, with tethered spacewalks, it nonetheless was significant. These commercial space suits cost a fraction of government suits and can be considered version 1.0 of suits that could one day enable many people to walk in space, on the moon, and eventually Mars.

Finally, on the mission’s final full day in space, the Dragon spacecraft demonstrated connectivity with a mesh of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit. The crew held a 40-minute, uninterrupted video call with flight operators back at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. During that time, according to the company, Dragon maintained contact via laser links to Starlink satellites through 16 firings of the spacecraft’s Draco thrusters.

This test demonstrated the viability of using the thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit as a means of providing high-speed Internet to people and spacecraft in space.

Wait, Isn’t This Just a Billionaire Joyride?

Some people have misunderstood the mission. They saw in Isaacman a financial tech billionaire gratifying his desire to go to space, inside a crew vehicle built by Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. Thus, this appeared to be just a roller-coaster ride for the ultrarich and famous—for those who could not sate their thrill-seeking with the pleasures attainable on planet Earth.

I understand this viewpoint, but I do not share it.