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SpaceX Polaris crew comes back down to Earth

Sep 15, 2024, 11:15am EDT
Joe Skipper/Reuters
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An historic mission to go boldly where no company has gone before has come to an end. SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn splashed down early Sept. 15 in the Gulf of Mexico after five days in space that saw its crew — a billionaire, two SpaceX engineers, and a veteran US Air Force pilot — fly higher above Earth than any crewed spacecraft since the Apollo program and pull off the first ever commercial spacewalk.

Aside from those achievements, the crew also completed a series of medical tests to illuminate how space affects the body. Few people go to space, and even fewer women (the two SpaceX employees were both women), and the ability to collect such data on more commercial flights will accelerate the science — and the ability to safely travel further into our solar system, NASA has said.

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