NASA
After a 177-day space flight, four astronauts returned to Earth early Friday morning aboard Crew Dragon Endurance†
NASA astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, undocked from the International Space Station on Thursday before lining up. Endurance for a return that brought it back to Earth across the Bay of Campeche, the Yucatan Peninsula and the Gulf of Mexico.
Seas were fair back then Endurance crashed at 12:43 p.m. ET on Friday (04:43 UTC), leaving a glassy surface on the ocean. The spacecraft was brought aboard the salvage ship, named Shannon, and the crew scrambled out less than an hour after landing. From there, they boarded a helicopter and then took a plane ride to Houston for family reunions.
This was EnduranceIts first space flight and its commander, Chari, said it performed admirably on the flight to and from the space station. “Thank you for letting us take Endurance on his shakedown cruise,” Chari said shortly after landing. “I look forward to seeing many more Endurance flights in the future. That was a great ride.”
While on board the station, the Crew-3 astronauts conducted hundreds of science experiments, such as testing drought-resistant cotton plants and researching vision loss. They brought back some of these experiments in freezers in the Dragon spacecraft.
Splashdown marked the completion of SpaceX’s fourth manned spaceflight for NASA — carrying a total of 14 astronauts to and from the International Space Station — as well as two private orbital spaceflights, the Inspiration4 and Axiom-1 missions. In addition, the Crew-4 mission recently launched on April 27 for NASA, with its four astronauts currently living on the station.
In less than two years since its debut as a human spaceflight vehicle, Crew Dragon has now flown more astronauts into orbit and back, 22, than NASA’s Gemini spacecraft, 20. Next up is the Apollo capsule, with 45 astronauts. The space shuttle’s number of more than 800 astronauts over three decades will likely remain out of reach until SpaceX’s much larger Starship vehicle comes online.
The past month has been especially busy for the private rocket company. SpaceX launched the private mission Axiom 1 on April 8 and landed it on April 25. Just two days later, on April 27, SpaceX launched the Crew-4 mission for NASA. And on Friday morning, her teams saw the Crew-3 flight make it home safely.
“If you look at all this work over the past month, you know, I really want to personally thank SpaceX for performing such seamless operations on all those missions,” said Kathy Lueders, NASA’s chief of manned space operations, during a post-landing. press conference. “Very quiet launches. Beautiful landings. And I really want to thank both ISS and the Commercial Crew teams, who spent long hours troubleshooting and facilitating a lot of operations on the runway and on the ground.”
SpaceX has also launched three other rockets in the past month; two Starlink satellite missions and a classified satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office. Additionally, SpaceX has scheduled a Starlink launch for Friday morning at 5:42 a.m. ET (09:42 UTC), just five hours after Crew-3’s landing.
So, is this too much for the company to handle in a secure manner? NASA officials say SpaceX has assigned enough people to different teams to handle all of the work. NASA’s Steve Stich, who manages the Commercial Crew program, also said that SpaceX differs from other space companies in the amount of work it automates, especially when it comes to reviewing data from launches and landings.
William Gerstenmaier, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, said the past month has been a “special time” for his company. But he added that different groups of people at SpaceX are each focused on different projects, and they’ve managed to maintain their focus. “Our heads haven’t been on a jumble,” he said.
The results seem to support that.
