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A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts to Earth descended from the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday morning.
The spacecraft recovered the spacecraft and crew at the International Space Station (ISS) after a six-month mission. The crew reported that they were feeling well, NASA said.
The capsule splashed at 2:56 (06:56 GMT) in the dark Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast after a six-and-a-half-hour flight from the ISS, images emitted by NASA’s WB-57 high. he showed aircraft to investigate altitude.
It was the first splash of darkness in the U.S. in 1968 when Apollo 8 crew returned from the moon.
The astronauts were supposed to return to Earth last Wednesday, but strong sea winds forced them to overcome a couple of SpaceX day landing attempts. Managers switched to a strange regatta in the dark to take advantage of the calm weather.
The four main parachutes were seen spreading before splashing.
Apollo 8 – NASA’s first flight to the moon with astronauts – ended with the Shelter in front of the Moon around Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean on December 27, 1968.
Eight years later, a Soviet capsule with two cosmonauts ended up in a dark, partially frozen lake in Kazakhstan. That was for the night crew regattas – until Sunday.
‘Thank you for flying SpaceX’
Astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Japanese Soichi Noguchi flew into space in November, in a vehicle made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX on the first operational mission to the ISS, in a vehicle of Elon Musk, who has become a commercial transport partner at NASA.
“We will return to planet Earth and thank you for flying SpaceX,” SpaceX’s Mission Controls announced after splashes. “For those of you who are enrolled in our frequent travel program, you have earned 68 million miles on this trip.”
“We’re going to take those miles,” the Hopkins spacecraft commander said. “Are they transferable?” SpaceX responded that the astronauts would have to check with the company’s marketing department.
The 167-day mission was the longest to launch a crew capsule from the United States. The previous 84-day record was set in 1974 by the last astronauts at NASA’s Skylab station.
Seven astronauts remain on the ISS including a new crew of four who arrived on a different SpaceX spacecraft last week. Previously, two American astronauts had completed a test mission to the ISS in May and had been there for two months.
This was the first launch from the US to the ISS since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011. It was also the first mission led by a private company, in front of NASA.
Until then, US astronauts had captured trips to the ISS on a Russian spacecraft.
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