SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts come home with rare pre-dawn splashdown By William Harwood
May 2, 2021 / 6:56 AM / CBS News
Four astronauts strapped into their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged to a fiery pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday, closing out the first operational flight of SpaceX s futuristic touch-screen ferry ship.
Crew-1 commander Michael Hopkins, 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 Saturday.
That set up only the second piloted water landing for NASA s post-shuttle commercial crew program and just the third night splashdown in space history the first in nearly 45 years.
The first six-month rotation of an International Space Station crew to be carried up and returned to Earth by commercial partner SpaceX is set to end in the early morning hours Sunday,
NASA s SpaceX first crew mission on way home from space station
1 2021-05-02 14:26:24Xinhua
Editor : Mo Hong e
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NASA s SpaceX Crew-1 mission undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday and was on its way back to Earth.
The Crew-1 mission, which consists of NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, is scheduled to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico at 2:57 a.m. Eastern Time (0657 GMT) Sunday.
The four astronauts are returning home after 167 days in space the most for a U.S. spacecraft since the final Skylab mission in 1974.