Astronauts spend more than five months in space, the longest time ever for a crew launched on a US-made spacecraft.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts back to Earth is creating history after a 53-year hiatus due to the last mission from NASA being carried out in December 1968.
The capsule crashed in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City after a six and a half hour flight from the International Space Station, as shown by night vision images taken by NASA’s high-altitude research aircraft WB-57.
The capsule left the space station in late May 1 after bad weather conditions at the mission’s main water distribution site twice delayed the return of the crew.
Crew -1 marks SpaceX’s second manned flight to the space station and its first flight lasting six months. The mission began in orbit on November 15.
SpaceX’s first astronaut mission, Demo-2 in May 2020, was a two-month test flight that brought two astronauts to the station. Although SpaceX’s third manned mission has begun, today’s comeback is only the second manned flight of the program. That third flight, called Crew-2, won’t take off until the end of this year.
The Crew-1 Dragon capsule, dubbed by astronauts as endurance, Hopkins and fellow NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi.
Astronaut Crew-1 was spotted by SpaceX in about 30 minutes. Soon after, they took a helicopter ride to land on their way to Houston, home to NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Crew-1 overlaps for about a week in orbit with its successor, the four-man Crew-2 mission. This crew includes NASA astronauts Shane Kimbro, Megan MacArthur, astronaut Jaxa Akihiko Hoscheid and European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet. The Quad will remain in orbit until it crashes, when the Crew-3 mission heads into space to replace it.
SpaceX is one of two companies that have traded with NASA for decades to get astronauts into space. Another company, Boeing, is developing a Starliner crew capsule for NASA missions. The spacecraft is expected to fly on its second unmanned test flight later this year, but is not yet transported by astronauts.
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