As we speak, four astronauts are on their way home after a five-month-long mission. In space, they spent their time in the International Space Station and are making their descent a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The astronauts set a world record for the longest time spent in space by a crew that launched from an American spacecraft.
On Saturday night the astronauts left the International Space Station around 8:30 p.m. on their spacecraft, which had been there since they arrived late last year in November. They spent the night falling back to Earth through orbit and as it grew closer, they kicked up the engines to tear through the atmosphere. Four giant parachutes will then be used to slow the spacecraft as it descends.
At around 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning the spacecraft landed right off the coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. A brigade of rescue ships was positioned at the landing spot to greet the crew on arrival. The crew was then taken back to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is the home base for all US astronauts, via helicopter.
The crew’s return on Sunday concludes a landmark mission for NASA and SpaceX. It is the first fully operational crewed mission for the Crew Dragon spacecraft, following up a test mission in May that carried NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, both test pilots, to the space station.
We can really expect to see amazing things in the future from these two companies working together. Who knows, maybe even in the near future one of these spacecraft could be taking the first human to Mars and back.
