SpaceX and NASA successfully returned astronauts who had been on the International Space Station for six months to Earth. The Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully landed off Florida on the night between Saturday and Sunday, supported by 4 parachutes.
It is the first time since 1968 that NASA has recovered a manned spacecraft at night at sea and the operation took place without any setbacks. The capsule was taken aboard a ship, where a medical team will assist the astronauts in the ever-strenuous return to gravity. A helicopter will then take the four to the mainland, where a final stop by plane will take them to Houston, the headquarters of NASA.
On board are three American astronauts and one Japanese, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker of NASA and Japanese Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. They had spent 160 days in space. The ditching was broadcast live by NASA.
The four astronauts were the first, among those on an operational mission, to be transported to the International Space Station by the space company of Elon Musk, the visionary billionaire, who has become a key partner of NASA. Two other Americans had already made the round trip aboard Dragon in 2020, but it had been a test mission of just two months: the first flight to the Station launched by the United States since the retirement of the Space Shuttles in 2011. and the first made by a private company with astronauts on board.
This is the first regular mission to be transported to Earth by SpaceX. For the return to the planet, the astronauts used the same Dragon spaceship, dubbed “Resilience”, which took them into orbit and which SpaceX plans to reuse for other missions. Resilience has an internal space of 9 square meters and has also brought back to Earth some experiments conducted on board the Station, in refrigerated security cabinets. The return of this crew, Crew-1, occurs after the arrival on board the Station last week of a second regular mission, Crew-2, also carried out by the American company. Among the astronauts who have just arrived in space, the Frenchman Thomas Pesquet.