The Crew Dragon put on a spectacular show as it descended across Florida in a blaze of super-heated plasma.
Blazing like a meteor as it streaked high above northern Florida, a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft safely carried four space station fliers back to Earth early Monday, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville to wrap up a six-month stay in orbit.
Crew-6 commander Stephen Bowen, pilot Woody Hoburg, cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and UAE crewmate Sultan Alneyadi undocked from the station’s forward Harmony module at 7:05 a.m. EDT Sunday to kick off a 17-hour flight back to Earth.
The automated Crew Dragon executed a 16-minute de-orbit thruster firing starting at 11:24 p.m., slowing the spacecraft by about 250 mph — just enough to drop it back into the lower atmosphere for a steep southwest-to-northeast trajectory carrying it above Central America and north Florida.
Viewed from the Kennedy Space Center, the returning spacecraft looked like a slow-motion meteor blazing a brilliant trail across the sky as the Crew Dragon was enveloped in a cloud of super-heated plasma, slowing from orbital velocity of 17,100 mph to just 300 mph or so in a matter of minutes.
With SpaceX recovery crews and NASA observers standing by, the capsule’s four main parachutes deployed on time, filled with air and lowered the spacecraft to a gentle splashdown in the Atlantic off Florida’s east coast at 12:17 a.m.
«On behalf of NASA and SpaceX, welcome back home,» a flight controller radioed from the California rocket builder’s control room. «Thank you for flying SpaceX.»
«We greatly appreciate all the support, from all the initial training, to the launch, throughout the mission. … This has been incredible,» Bowen replied. «We certainly appreciate it and look forward to working with you all again.
