SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts return home with a rare splash before dawn in the Gulf of Mexico

Four astronauts tied to their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, disconnected from the International Space Station and plunged into a burning splashdown before dawn in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, closed the first operational flight of SpaceX’s futuristic touchscreen ferry.

Crew 1 Chief Michael Hopkins, along with NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, disconnected from the station’s front Harmony module spaceport at 20:35 EDT on Saturday.

It established only the second pilot water landing for NASA’s commercial crew program after the shuttle and only the third night landing in space history, the first in almost 45 years.

But Crew Dragon performed a textbook back to Earth, went off course, put out four large parachutes and settled in a soft splashdown south of Panama City, Florida, at 2:56 a.m., completing a mission that covered 2,688 courses in 168 days since its launch in November last year. .

“Dragon, on behalf of NASA and the SpaceX teams, we welcome you to planet Earth and thank you for flying with SpaceX,” said the company’s capsule communicator via radio. “For those of you who are enrolled in our frequent flyer program, you have earned 68 million miles on this trip.”

“It’s good to be back on planet Earth,” Hopkins replied. “And we want to take those miles. Can they be transferred? ”

“And Dragon, we have to refer him to our marketing department for that policy.”

Despite the night landing, NASA’s WB-57 tracking aircraft captured spectacular infrared views of the capsule as it sank through the dense lower atmosphere, while cameras aboard SpaceX’s recovery ship showed the moment of splashdown.

SpaceX crews rushed to Crew Dragon to secure the spacecraft and transport it aboard a company to restore the company. The astronauts remained inside waiting for the capsule to be transported on board where personnel were waiting to help them out, if necessary on stretchers, when they began to adjust to gravity after five and a half months in space.

“What a trip! Thanks to the @NASA, @SpaceX and @USCG teams for a safe and successful trip back to Earth, ”tweeted Glover. “One step closer to family and home!”

Before traveling alone, Hopkins sent flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, saying “on behalf of Crew-1 and our families, we just want to thank you.”

“We want to thank you for this incredible vehicle, resilience,” he said. “We said it before the mission, and I will say it again hereafter. It’s amazing what can be achieved when people get together. So in the end I would honestly say that you all change the world .. Congratulations. It is. Great to be back. “

After medical checks and phone calls home to friends and family, the four crew members were to be flown ashore by helicopter and handed over to NASA personnel for a flight back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

While mission leaders prefer landings in daylight, bad weather ruled out plans for re-entry on Wednesday and Saturday. With mild winds expected early on Sunday, NASA and SpaceX agreed to target a return before dawn for Crew-1 astronauts.

“Night landing? At sea? It’s good that there’s a marine pilot on board! You have this ”@AstroVicGlover! Astronaut Nick Hague tweeted, pointing to Glover’s experience as a pilot for a Navy F / A-18 operator. Resilience Crew. ”

Unlike Crew Dragon’s first pilot landing in August last year, when the spacecraft was quickly surrounded by boaters enjoying a sunny Sunday afternoon in the Gulf, the Coast Guard planned to enforce a 10-mile safety zone for this landing to keep spectators early in the morning. . So far away.

The return of the crew kite completed a rotation of the crew at a record speed that required two launches and two landings with four different spacecraft in just three weeks to replace the entire seven-man crew on the International Space Station.

April 9 was a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Oleg Novitskiy, Pyotr Dubrov and NASA astronaut Mark Vande brought Hi to the station after a launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. They replaced another Soyuz crew – Sergey Ryzhikov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Kate Rubins, who returned to Earth on April 17.

Then, April 24, a Crew picked up Dragon Crew-2 chief Shane Kimbrough, NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet and Japanese aviator Akihiko Hoshide. to the station. The first phase of the Falcon 9 rocket as launched them the day before He also helped launch Hopkins and the company, the crew they replace on board the station.

After helping the Crew-2 astronauts settle aboard the laboratory complex, Hopkins, Glover, Walker and Noguchi, who arrived at the station on 16 November, said goodbye to his seven crew members Saturday night and boarded his own crew kite to loosen up.

After a safe distance, the ship’s aircraft computer struck the ship’s brake propellers for approximately 16.5 minutes from 02:03 on Sunday.

Moving through space at over 17,100 km / h, over 83 soccer fields per second, the rocket reduced the fired crew kite by 258 km / h, enough to drop the other side of the course in the dense lower atmosphere on a road pointing to the Gulf of Mexico Zone.

Protected by a high-tech heat shield, Crew Dragon crashed into the noticeable atmosphere around 02.45 and quickly braked in a flame of atmospheric friction.

Once outside the plasma heating zone, the parachute’s parachute was deployed so that the spacecraft could settle on a relatively mild impact in the Gulf.

The last previous night landing in the water occurred in October 1976 when two cosmonauts in a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft made an unplanned descent into snowstorm-like conditions after a failed docking, deviating from the course of a large lake in Kazakhstan. It took the recovery teams nine hours to move the spacecraft ashore and rescue the cosmonauts.

The only second night landing occurred in December 1968, when the Apollo 8 crew, returning from a Christmas trip around the moon, made a planned and uneventful landing before a quiet morning in the Pacific Ocean.

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