SpaceX Dragon Capsule Splashes Down




After spending almost half a year aboard the international space station, a spaceX dragon capsule carrying four astronauts back to earth successfully splashed down off the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday. The spaceX dragon touched the coasts of Florida and made the first nighttime landing in over fifty years. 

A group called Crew-1 had plans of coming back during the day on Wednesday but the return got postponed multiple times due to bad and unstable weather conditions.

Elon Musk's SpaceX successfully completed its Crew-1 mission for NASA in the early hours. The capsule was called Resilience and had taken off for the International Space Station in November, carrying the four Crew-1 astronauts. 

The crew-1 team had chosen the name 'Resilience' for their crew dragon spacecraft in honor of the NASA and SpaceX teams that worked in midst of the pandemic to get their mission started as well as the global public's support in spite of their struggles at that time. 

Glover said  Resilience to be one of the most important aspects in the current business and exploration period.

In the Crew-1 team, three astronauts were from the United States while one hailed from Japan. The International Space Station now has seven people left. Four of these seven people had arrived there last week via SpaceX aboard its Crew-2 mission.

Crew-1 team members, starting mid- November 2020, had joined the members of Expedition 64 to conduct micro-gravity studies at the International Space Station (ISS).

Moments before the Crew-1 splashed down, SpaceX's mission control radioed for welcoming NASA's Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Japan's space agency astronaut Soichi Naguchi back to planet Earth and thanking them for flying SpaceX. 

The Dragon's Mission

SpaceX is a private American aerospace manufacturing and space transportation services company that was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the motive of enabling the colonization of Mars.

SpaceX's Dragon Capsule from the very beginning was designed to transport both NASA and commercial astronauts to places in low-Earth orbit, the Moon, and beyond. 

The crew had carried with themselves the materials to investigate food physiology meant for studying the effects of dietary improvements on immune function and also the gut microbiome. They were supposed to study how those improvements helped the crews to adapt to spaceflight. 

After the spacecraft's six-month-long mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), boats were sent for retrieving the spacecraft along with its crew. 

After a six-and-a-half-hour flight from the International Space Station (ISS), the SpaceX capsule splashed down in the night in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast at 2:56 am that is 06:56 GMT.

What Do Astronauts Have to Say about the Mission?

American Victor Glover, one of the astronauts in the group called Crew- said that he felt really heavy while returning to Earth on SpaceX capsule and that he kept telling himself to keep inhaling and breathing as the pressure made him feel like those cartoons when they experience G and their face is sagging down. 

Glover added that he expected the 6-month mission to be so dynamic and challenging that the actual event felt a little less than what he was expecting him to be like.

He found the mission enjoyable all around as he thinks of the launch and entry to be very unique experiences for all the astronauts. Japanese astronaut Soichi  Naguchi found the landing to be pretty smooth.The company is also planning to send space tourists or civilians who are not trained astronauts into the capsule to the other side as they believe that a few such experiences would make them a little familiar with such rough and challenging launch and landings and that they very soon still stop seeing space travel as an alien thing to them.

Unlike NASA, a taxpayer-funded entity having the freedom of pursuing discoveries and explorations having no link to financial gains, SpaceX is a for-profit company.

However, SpaceX is currently one of the two companies that are contracted by NASA for sending its astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX very frequently launches other spacecraft for the space agency.

Many believe that NASA has moved forward with its plan of choosing SpaceX based on its pricing and technical merit. There is a solid competition between SpaceX and NASA.

NASA scores were higher in six areas that are overall rating, compensation and benefits, work-life balance, senior management, culture, and values. SpaceX, on the other hand, scored higher in 2 areas which are CEO approval and positive business outlook. Both the companies tied when it came to career opportunities.

NASA had announced the selection of SpaceX Star-ship for landing humans on the Moon as a part of the agency's Artemis program in the April of this year. NASA had agreed to pay nothing more than 2.9 billion dollars to SpaceX over the next few years.

Written by - Devyani Roy

Edited by - Akanksha Sharma