After over 160 days in space, the capsule Crew Dragon di SpaceX which had detached from the ISS at 20:35, US East Coast time, returned to Earth. The spacecraft landed successfully, supported by 4 parachutes, brought back the astronauts who had been on the International Space Station for six months. The aerospace company founded by the billionaire Elon Musk in a tweet he expresses all the enthusiasm for the success of the mission: "Welcome back to Earth".
SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, carrying four astronauts, three Americans and one Japanese, left the International Space Station at the scheduled time and in six and a half hours landed off the coast of Florida. Uncoupled from the Space Station's Harmony module, the spacecraft - named Resilience - brought back to Earth as well as the four astronauts the results of important experiments conducted on board the ISS.
The return of this crew, Crew-1, takes place after the arrival on board the ISS, last week, of a second regular mission, Crew-2, also carried out by the SpaceX company. The landing, at 8:57 Italian time, took place off the coast of Panama City in the Gulf of Mexico. Other alternative sites had also been designated should the need arise.
"We trained to recover crews day and night", had reassured Steve Stich, head of NASA's commercial flight program. The Spacex company ships will reach the capsule "About 10 minutes later", he explained. On board Crew Dragon are the Americans Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and the Japanese Soichi Noguchi who reached the ISS in November traveling with SpaceX, one of NASA's main partners. The strategic role of Elon Musk's company has restored prestige to the United States, which has returned to bring men back into space since the Space Shuttle era. A goal that has inevitably called into question the spatial relations between Russia and the US and decreed the end of the Russian monopoly. Crew Dragon is officially the second vehicle able to reach the ISS in addition to the traditional Russian Soyuz. Six months ago, the first Crew Dragon operational flight after docking with the Space Station's Harmony module - the same one the Shuttle docked with. The four of the recently completed Expedition 64 mission met and embraced Commander Sergey Ryzhikov, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, both Russians, and the American Kathleen Rubins who took care of opening the hatch.