Splashdown! NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 returns to Earth after International Space Station mission

ROCKLEDGE, Fla. – NASA’s Crew-5 mission wrapped up Saturday night in the Gulf of Mexico with the splashdown return of a SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying a crew of four astronauts.

After nearly six months in space, NASA’s Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan’s Koichi Wakata, and Russia’s Anna Kikina departed the International Space Station at 2:20 a.m. EST Saturday before blazing through the atmosphere, their heat shield enduring temperatures up to 3,500 degrees.

Where was the SpaceX capsule splashdown?

The nearly 19-hour return trip concluded with a parachute-assisted splashdown of the Dragon “Endurance” capsule off the coast of Tampa at 9:02 p.m. ET.

As the 17,000-pound capsule bobbed in an area cordoned off by the Coast Guard, a SpaceX recovery team approached to confirm that no toxic propellants were present. The capsule was then rigged up and hoisted onto the deck of SpaceX’s custom-built recovery vessel named “Shannon.”

Mission was ‘successful’ 

The crew would complete medical checkouts aboard the vessel before boarding a helicopter destined for the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there, they travel home. For astronauts Mann, Cassada, and Wakata, the trip’s final leg returns them to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, while Kikina will return home to Russia.

Splashdown officially completes a mission dedicated to thousands of hours of science experiments and station maintenance.

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Nicole Mann, Crew-5 mission commander and first indigenous woman to travel to space, said just after departure: “To the teams at NASA and at SpaceX, thank you for an incredible expedition. It has been your tireless effort and attention to detail that have helped make this mission successful.”

A Marine Corps colonel, Mann closed her remarks with the motto of the military branch, saying, “It has been an honor to add to the legacy. Semper Fidelis.”

What to know about SpaceX

SpaceX has launched seven crewed missions for NASA, including May 2020’s Demo-2 mission, under a multibillion-dollar Commercial Crew Program contract that restored American access to crewed spaceflight after nearly a decade without the space shuttle.

The Crew-5 mission was SpaceX’s sixth crewed flight under contract from NASA and eighth overall when including private spaceflights. It also marked the first time since NASA’s shuttle program that a Russian cosmonaut flew aboard an American-made spacecraft.

The latest mission, Crew-6, carried NASA’s Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, the United Arab Emirates’ Sultan Alneyadi, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev to the ISS just over a week ago after launching on March 2. That mission is expected to return in the fall after about a six-month stay.