SpaceX completes a historic mission, crew flight possible later in 2019

Ars Technica » Scientific Method 2019-03-08

All four parachutes opened as intended, bringing Dragon to a soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday.

Enlarge / All four parachutes opened as intended, bringing Dragon to a soft landing in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday. (credit: NASA TV)

After a six-day mission in orbit, SpaceX's Dragon capsule returned to Earth on Friday morning and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. The landing, at 8:45am ET, came right on schedule, as did pretty much every milestone during the Crew Dragon's first mission, a test before humans fly aboard the vehicle.

Shortly after the landing, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell could be seen on NASA's webcast, walking around her company's mission control at its headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Shotwell spent a few minutes shaking the hands of each controller and offering a few hugs. Certainly, this triumphant moment capped an emotional week for a company that has worked for the better part of a decade to develop a crewed spacecraft.

At first blush, the performance of Dragon appears to have met or exceeded NASA's hopes for this flight to the International Space Station, including during the critical descent back to Earth Friday morning. "The vehicle really did better than we expected," Steve Stich, deputy Commercial Crew program manager for NASA, said shortly after the landing.

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