NASA astronauts share Crew Dragon's descend experience: 'Sounds like an animal'

SpaceX’s crewed capsule, called the Dragon, descended into the environment at 17,500 mph on August 2 and the NASA astronauts described the spacecraft’s experience as “sounds like an animal.” While the Demo-2 mission was smooth, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley said they felt “jolts, tremors and rolls” as capsule Endeavour touched down from SpaceX's first-ever crewed mission. In a live-streamed conference on NASA Live TV, the mission commander Bob Behnkhen said the spacecraft “came alive” off the coast of Pensacola, Florida.

Capsule Endeavour had a primary water touchdown, the first-ever US spaceship to descend on the coast since 1975. “The atmosphere starts to make noise, you can hear that rumble outside the vehicle and as the vehicle tries to control, you feel a little bit of that shimmy in your body,” Behnkhen said at a live-streamed conference. “It doesn’t sound like a machine, it sounds like an animal coming through the atmosphere with all that all the puffs that are happening from the thrusters and the atmospheric noise,” he added. The astronauts described the journey down on the earth as “deafening”, as the vessel carried out sequences jettisoning its “trunk”, according to reports. The process of firing parachute was explained as “bone-jarring.” “Very much like getting hit in the back of the chair with a baseball bat, you know, just a crack,” the 50-year-old astronaut Behnkhen was reported as saying at the live online news conference.  

[NASA TV video, astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley wave during a news conference, Tuesday, Aug. 4, 2020, in Houston. The two NASA astronauts returned to Earth on Sunday in a dramatic, retro-style splashdown carried out by Elon Musk's SpaceX company]

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Once we descended a little bit into the atmosphere, the Dragon really, it came alive, Behnken said from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston on NASA Live TV.

NASA initially provided astronauts' information

However, according to reports, the astronauts had mentioned that the sounds and sensations while terminating the two-month-long Demo-2 with coming down on Earth was “normal”. Further, there were at least four spaceflights the two astronauts had experienced that employed NASA's now-retired space shuttle. NASA had initially provided the astronauts with audio recordings and other information related to Crew Dragon's first-ever trip to the space station, on the uncrewed Demo-1 mission in 2019, reports confirmed. While Behnken and Hurley said that the space journey was a “wild ride”, they hadn’t been able to witness the views outside until they were whisked onto the SpaceX recovery ship GO Navigator and removed from Endeavour, a report confirmed the two as saying. NASA, SpaceX and the Coast Guard had since made plans to introduce changes for a better splashdown in future.  

Almost kind of speechless—Astronaut Hurley said at NASA's digital conference.

Separation of the crew service "trunk" was described as a "hit in the back of a chair with a baseball bat, a crack” by the astronauts at the live-streamed conference. Parachute deployment gave "a significant jolt," Behnkhen said. Hurley, on the other hand, described the re-entry as a ‘pretty demanding environment.” 

[NASA TV video, astronauts Bob Behnken, left, and Doug Hurley laugh during a news conference]

[Provided by NASA, support teams and curious recreational boaters arrive at the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft shortly after it landed with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley on board in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Pensacola]

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(Images Credit: NASA/AP)