On May 2, four astronauts plunged to a pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after their trip to the International Space Station, or ISS, while aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.
SpaceX Crew Dragon Back to Earth
Michael Hopkins, the Crew-1 commander, along with NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, disconnected from the space-facing port of the station's forward Harmony module at 8:35 p.m. EDT on May 1.
According to Space.com., this landing is recorded as the third nighttime landing in the history of NASA.
However, the Crew Dragon executed a textbook return to Earth, dropping out of orbit, deploying four massive parachutes, and settling to a gentle splashdown south of Panama City, Florida, at 2:56 a.m., finishing a mission spanning 2,688 orbits over 168 days since its launch in November 2020.
Despite landing at the dead-of-night, NASA's WB-57 tracking aircraft captured spectacular infrared views of the capsule as it descended through the dense lower atmosphere, while cameras on SpaceX's recovery ship showed the exact moment of the capsule's splashdown.
The SpaceX crew rushed to the Crew Dragon to make sure that the spacecraft is in one piece and haul it on board a company recovery ship, The New York Times reported.
The four astronauts remained inside, waiting for the capsule to be hauled aboard where personnel were standing by to help them all get out safely. There were even stretchers in case it is needed, and they began re-adjusting to gravity after five and a half months in space.
After the medical checks and phone calls home to friends and family, all four crew members were flown to shore by a helicopter and handed off to a NASA personnel for a flight back to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Nighttime Landing
While mission managers prefer daylight landings, rough weather ruled out re-entry plans on Apr. 28 and May 1. With mild winds expected on May 2, both NASA and SpaceX agreed to target a pre-dawn return for the Crew-1 astronauts.
Unlike the first piloted Crew Dragon splashdown last August, when the spacecraft was quickly surrounded by boaters in the Mexican Gulf, the Coast Guard planned enforced a 10-mile-wide safety zone for this landing to keep any early morning onlookers away from the area.
The Crew Dragon's return completed a record-pace crew rotation requiring two launches and two landings with four different spacecraft in just three weeks to replace the International Space Station's entire seven-member crew.
The most recent nighttime water landing came in October 1976 when two cosmonauts in a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft, making an unplanned descent in blizzard-like conditions after a failed docking, were blown off course into a massive lake in Kazakhstan.
It took recovery crews nine hours to move the spacecraft to shore and rescue the cosmonauts, according to CNN.
The only other night splashdown came in December 1968 when the crew of Apollo 8 came home from a Christmas trip around the moon, and carried out a planned, uneventful pre-dawn landing in the Pacific Ocean.
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Written by Sophie Webster
