The Resilience spacecraft with the Crew-1 mission aboard undocked from the International Space Station at 20:35 EDT May 1, and as the capsule descended closer to Earth, four large parachutes deployed, making a flawless splashdown safely in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida, at 02:56 EDT today.
The Crew-1 team included NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins (commander), Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, wrapping up a mission spanning 2,688 orbits over 168 days since launch last November 2020.
This was only the second piloted water landing for NASA’s post-shuttle era, and just the third nighttime splashdown in space history — the first in nearly 45 years. A piloted re-entry is particularly challenging, due to the effects of gravity interfering with balance and orientation as governed by the inner ear, causing delayed reactions and a decrease in the ability to track moving objects,
As with the previous splashdown, a SpaceX company ship was waiting to retrieve the capsule, with stretchers if needed by the astronauts, to disembark the crew and hand them off to NASA personnel for medical checks and a flight by helicopter to Johnson Space Center in Houston, for further evaluation.
While he was waiting to exit the capsule, Commander Michael Hopkins radioed to the flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California: “On behalf of Crew-1 and our families … we want to say thank you for this amazing vehicle, Resilience. We said it before the mission and I’m going to say it again here afterward, it’s amazing what can be accomplished when people come together. So finally, I’d just like to say, quite frankly, you all are changing the world. Congratulations. It’s great to be back.”
As reported by CBS News, the “Crew Dragon’s return completed a record-pace crew rotation requiring two launches and two landings with four different spacecraft over just three weeks to replace the International Space Station’s entire seven-member crew.”
