[오늘, 지구촌] Polaris Dawn’s Blue Star Return: ‘First Civilian Spacewalk’

Foreign media reported on the 15th (local time) that the Polaris Dawn team, the first civilians to perform a spacewalk, successfully completed their five-day space flight and returned to Earth.

Polaris Dawn is a private spaceflight project led by Gerard Isaacman, the billionaire founder of credit card processing company Shift4Page. The team includes retired Air Force pilot Scott Kidd Forti and SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon.

Dragon traveled more than six times around the Earth in an elliptical orbit, reaching a maximum altitude of 1,400 kilometers (870 miles). That’s more than three times higher than the International Space Station’s orbit and the highest point reached by humans in nearly half a century since NASA’s Apollo lunar missions in 1972.

SpaceX’s space capsule ‘Dragon’, carrying four members of the ‘Polaris Dawn’ team, safely landed in the Gulf of Mexico near Florida, USA, hanging on four parachutes at dawn today.

This is the first spacewalk by a civilian, not a professional astronaut from a government agency like NASA. Gillis also played the background music of the movie ‘Star Wars’ on his violin and recorded it to send back to Earth. SpaceX sees this test as the beginning of a spacesuit test for the expected future Mars mission.