SpaceX Crew Dragon makes 1st nighttime splashdown with US astronauts since 1968 | Watch

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, ferrying four astronauts back from the International Space Station (ISS), made a successful landing on May 2. All the four astronauts belonging to SpaceX’s Crew-I Mission splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City at 2:56 a.m. EDT, a minute ahead of the scheduled time. All four main parachutes could be seen deploying just before splashdown, which was also visible in the infrared. Seconds later, a recovery ship retrieved the capsule from the sea, ending their crew’s 6-month long mission. The astronauts are the first US crew to make a nighttime splashdown since 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission to orbit the moon.

"Dragon, on behalf of NASA and SpaceX teams, we welcome you back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX. For those of you enrolled in our frequent flier program, you've earned 68 million miles [109 million kilometers] on this voyage," a SpaceX crew operations and resources engineer told the Crew-1 astronauts after splashdown. 

“We’ll take those miles,” said spacecraft commander Mike Hopkins. “Are they transferrable?” SpaceX replied that the astronauts would have to check with the company’s marketing department.

Within a half-hour of splashdown, the charred capsule had been hoisted onto the recovery ship, with the astronauts exiting soon afterward. Hopkins was the first one out, doing a little dance as he emerged under the intense spotlights. “It’s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together,” he told SpaceX flight controllers at company headquarters in Hawthorne, California. “Quite frankly, you all are changing the world. Congratulations. It’s great to be back.”

(NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins is helped out of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP))

Saturday night’s undocking left seven people at the space station, four of whom arrived a week ago via SpaceX. “Earthbound!” NASA astronaut Victor Glover, the capsule’s pilot, tweeted after departing the station. “One step closer to family and home!” Hopkins and Glover — along with NASA’s Shannon Walker and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi — should have returned to Earth last Wednesday, but high offshore winds forced SpaceX to pass up a pair of daytime landing attempts. Managers switched to a rare splashdown in darkness, to take advantage of calm weather.

(From left to right, Walker, Glover, Hopkins and Noguchi. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP))

Crew-1 Mission

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 mission launched November 15, 2020, on a Falcon 9 rocket from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts named the spacecraft Resilience, in honour of their families, colleagues, and fellow citizens and highlighting the dedication displayed by the teams involved with the mission and demonstrating that there is no limit to what humans can achieve when they work together. Crew Dragon Resilience docked to the Harmony module’s forward port of the space station November 16, nearly 27 hours after liftoff.

Image Credits: SpaceX/Twitter