SpaceX brought four astronauts back from the International Space Station on Sunday and let the first US crew splash in the dark since the Apollo 8 moon shot.
The kite capsule flew into the Gulf of Mexico just before 3 a.m. off the coast of Panama City, Florida, completing the second astronaut flight for Elon Musk’s company. It was an express trip home that only took 6 1/2 hours.
The astronauts, three Americans and one Japanese, flew back in the same capsule called Resilience that they took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in November. Their 167-day mission is the longest for astronauts taking off from the United States. The previous record of 84 days was set in 1974 by the last crew of the NASA Skylab station.
After undocking on Saturday evening, seven people were on the space station, four of whom arrived via SpaceX a week ago. “Earthbound!” NASA astronaut Victor Glover tweeted after leaving the station. “One step closer to family and home!”
Glover should have returned to Earth with Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker from NASA and Soichi Noguchi from Japan last Wednesday, but strong offshore winds forced SpaceX to miss two landing attempts a day. Managers switched to a rare splash of water in the dark to take advantage of the calm weather.
SpaceX had practiced a night return, just in case, and had even recovered its latest station cargo capsule from the Gulf of Mexico in the dark. Infrared cameras tracked the capsule as it re-entered the atmosphere. it resembled a bright star that grazed the night sky.
All four main parachutes were in use shortly before the hosing down, which was also visible in the infrared range.
Apollo 8 – NASA’s first flight to the moon with astronauts ended on December 27, 1968 with a pre-dawn splash in the Pacific near Hawaii. Eight years later, a Soviet capsule landed with two cosmonauts in a dark, partially frozen lake in Kazakhstan. Lost course in a blizzard. That’s it for the nightly crew splashdown until Sunday.
Despite the early hour, the coast guard was on the move at full speed to force a 18-kilometer exclusion zone around the rocking kite capsule. When the SpaceX crew first returned in August, pleasure boaters swarmed the capsule, a security risk. On board the SpaceX salvage ship, the astronauts planned to board a helicopter for the short flight ashore and then take a plane straight to Houston to meet with their families.
Your Resilience capsule will return to Cape Canaveral to renovate SpaceX’s first private crew mission in September. The docking mechanism of the space station is removed and a brand new dome window is put in its place.
A tech billionaire bought the entire three-day flight, which will orbit 120 kilometers above the space station. He will fly with two competition winners and a medical assistant from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, his charity for the mission. The next SpaceX astronaut launch for NASA will follow in October.
NASA turned to private companies to service the space station after the shuttle fleet was withdrawn from service in 2011. SpaceX began supply runs in 2012 and launched its first crew last May, ending NASA’s dependence on Russia for astronaut transportation. Boeing is not expected to launch astronauts until early next year.
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