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.
