The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, from the company led by Elon Musk, brought four astronauts back to Earth from the International Space Station, having loved, with the use of parachutes, in the Gulf of Mexico, NASA announced.
The return of these astronauts marked the end of the first manned mission to the Station by the Crew Dragon spacecraft, developed in partnership between NASA and Musk’s space adventure company – who is also the CEO of electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla.
The crew – made up of three NASA elements, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and the Japanese Soichi Noguchi (from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) [JAXA]) – had left Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on November 15, powered by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The capus, which the crew called Resilience, loved off the coast of Panama City, off Florida.
This was the first ditching at night of a US manned spacecraft since the arrival of Apollo 8 before dawn, in the Pacific Ocean, on December 27, 1968. More than 52 years ago.
Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 and maintains a galactic rivalry with Jeff Bezos, the still CEO of Amazon (but who will leave the reins of the e-commerce company in the third quarter of this year.
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