SpaceX's Dragon capsule made the first U.S. crew splashdown in darkness since the Apollo 8 moonshot.
“Earthbound!” NASA astronaut Victor Glover tweeted after departing the station. “One step closer to family and home!”Glover — along with NASA’s Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi — should have returned to Earth last Wednesday, but high offshore winds forced SpaceX to pass up a pair of daytime landing attempts. Managers switched to a rare splashdown in darkness, to take advantage of calm weather.
SpaceX had practiced for a nighttime return, just in case, and even recovered its most recent station cargo capsule from the Gulf of Mexico in darkness. Infrared cameras tracked the capsule as it re-entered the atmosphere; it resembled a bright star streaking through the night sky. All four main parachutes could be seen deploying just before splashdown, which was also visible in the infrared.
Apollo 8 — NASA’s first flight to the moon with astronauts — ended with a predawn splashdown in the Pacific near Hawaii on Dec. 27, 1968. Eight years later, a Soviet capsule with two cosmonauts ended up in a dark, partially frozen lake in Kazakhstan, blown off course in a blizzard.Despite the early hour, the Coast Guard was out in full force to enforce an 11-mile keep-out zone around the bobbing Dragon capsule.