SpaceX teams, accompanied by NASA, picked up the capsule crew this morning at 6:43 a.m. Crew Dragon in the Gulf of Mexico. The return of the four astronauts, in good shape, marks the end of the crew rotations of spring in the International Space Station.
Crew Dragon capsules continue to accumulate miles!
The transition before departure
It’s the end of a busy week for the astronauts on the Crew-3 mission, which ended with their arrival on SpaceX’s capsule recovery boat, before some medicals and a return to terra firma by helicopter. Americans Thomas Marshburn, Raja Chari, Kayla Barron and German Matthias Maurer are doing well.
By April 28, their “replacements” from the Crew-4 mission had arrived on the ISS, which started the countdown for a smooth transition between arrivals and departures. During a conference broadcast by the ESA on May 3, Samantha Cristoforetti, after a weekend on the station, had underlined the value of these practical explanations. They allow both to precisely pursue scientific experiments, but also to know where such everyday object is stored… And even for the Italian who had stayed in the station in 2015, the latter had changed a lot.
A hassle-free return
Business already well packed, the members of the Crew-3 crew said their official farewells a little early on May 4, when command was handed over to Russian Oleg Artemyev, a classic handover before the departure of the astronauts for Earth.
The latter had a relatively long return with an undocking on May 5 at 7:20 a.m. and a landing almost 24 hours later… But nothing particular in this time frame, it was essentially a question of waiting for the capsule to be well aligned with the recovery site. The opening of the four parachutes and the arrival in the Gulf of Mexico took place at 12:43 a.m. local time, in the middle of the night, but this did not disturb the teams, who are now familiar with them.
What looks easy, but isn’t
With five manned missions in NASA service (including one in progress, Crew-4) and two private missions, SpaceX has already taken 26 passengers into orbit, all in just two years. A success for this capsule developed in public-private partnership at the service of NASA, and which is already promised a bright future.
In the United States, only the Apollo capsules and the shuttles took more astronauts into space! The next rotation to the ISS is scheduled for the end of September with Soyuz, so the station crew will remain stable until then. How to work peacefully! For the next manned orbital flight, we will have to turn to China, by next month…
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Source : Nasaspaceflight
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