SpaceX mission: four astronauts return from five-month ISS mission

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On Saturday evening, the crew are expected to board their spacecraft, which has remained attached to the space station’s docking ports since the astronauts arrived in November. They will detach from the ISS around 8:30 p.m. ET, then spend the night aboard their capsule as it flies freely in orbit. The spacecraft will ignite its on-board engines to safely reduce Earth’s thick atmosphere, and it will use a series of parachutes to slow its decent before splashing off Florida on Sunday morning around 2:57 a.m.ET.

As the vehicle glides towards the ocean with a plume of four large parachutes floating above, a brigade of rescue ships will be positioned in the Gulf of Mexico to greet the crew on arrival. The astronauts will then be brought back by helicopter or boat to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, which is the base for all American astronauts.

Recovery teams will try to complete their return as quickly as possible. Splashing in the ocean can be difficult for astronauts, as the floating waves can cause severe seasickness. When asked what meal he was looking forward to when he returned home, NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins admitted he probably wouldn’t feel up to a gourmet meal.

“If I have an appetite, it’s going to be a bonus,” Hopkins said at a remote press conference Monday.

Authorities are closely monitoring nearby water for intruders. During the Crew Dragon Demo-2 splash in August, a swarm of unidentified flag-waving boats encroached on the recovery area. But Coast Guard crews are currently stationed around the perimeter, hoping to prevent a repeat of this scenario.

SpaceX rocket carrying four astronauts launches from Florida
The capsule has working toilets, and the astronauts – NASA’s Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese space agency astronaut – will have time to sleep while the fully autonomous vehicle orbits while those in charge from SpaceX and NASA in Houston, Texas, and Hawthorne, California, watch over the trip.
Walker served as the space station’s commander and on Tuesday she officially handed over control to Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide, who arrived at the ISS last week aboard another SpaceX spacecraft.

The crew’s return on Sunday will conclude a historic mission for NASA and SpaceX: this is the first fully crewed mission of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, following a test mission in May that carried the astronauts of NASA Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, both test pilots, at the space station.

This is only the second time SpaceX and NASA have brought astronauts home aboard a Crew Dragon spacecraft, after Behnken and Hurley returned from SpaceX’s Demo-2 mission in August. And Behnken had described the return trip as the most painful part of the journey home.

The spacecraft becomes extremely hot due to the rapid compression of air and the friction of air molecules rubbing against its exterior, although a thick heat shield will protect the astronauts inside as the vehicle roars towards its exterior. target: “It doesn’t look like a machine. It looks like an animal,” Behnken told reporters last year.

But this mission, dubbed Crew-1, is not a test. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon was officially certified as a people-worthy spacecraft ahead of Crew-1’s launch in November, paving the way for relatively routine travel, carrying astronauts from diverse backgrounds.

Walker and Noguchi, for example, both have backgrounds in physics. And the team led experiments during their five-month stay on the ISS, including research into how microgravity affects human heart tissue. They also performed space walks to improve and repair the exterior of the space station, and they grew radishes to build on studies designed to understand how food could be grown to support missions to deep space exploration.
NASA astronauts can't wait to leave Earth for SpaceX mission

The astronauts were even able to eat some of the crops they were growing, Hopkins said at a recent press conference.

“I think we would all agree that it’s amazing to be cool [food] here, ”Hopkins said.

It was Glover’s very first mission to space, and his mission was historic as he became the first black person to become a full-time staff member of the ISS.

“One thing that really struck me was the very first time I got up from the seat after [our spacecraft] was in orbit safely, and I looked out the window and saw the Earth 250 miles high, “Glover said.” I’ll never forget that moment … It wasn’t about of sight. It was what the sight made me feel … the Earth is amazing. It’s beautiful. He protects us and so we have to work hard to protect him. “

The United States spent nearly a decade without the ability to launch astronauts into space after the Space Shuttle program was withdrawn in 2011, and NASA was forced to rely on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft to bring astronauts at the ISS, which the space agency says left the multibillion-dollar orbiting Laboratory understaffed. No fewer than 13 astronauts were on board at the same time in 2009. That number has sometimes dropped to three on multiple occasions, leaving fewer people to help run experiments and help keep the space station well maintained. However, with the latest SpaceX missions, the staff has reached 11.

SpaceX developed the Crew Dragon capsule as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, which, for the first time in the history of the space agency, entrusted much of the design, development and testing of new human-class spacecraft to the private sector. NASA awarded SpaceX and Boeing fixed price contracts worth $ 2.6 billion and $ 4.2 billion, respectively, to do the job. Development of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is still delayed due to major software issues detected during a test mission last year, but officials say the vehicle could be ready this year.

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