Four astronauts returned safely to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) Sunday morning (2) in the SpaceX capsule, The Crew Dragon “Resilience”. And NASA reported that the capsule’s landing occurred in the Gulf of Mexico.
In a statement, the agency said the return marked the end of the crew’s first mission to the station by the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which was developed in partnership between NASA and Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company.
The crew – consisting of Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker from NASA and Soichi Noguchi from JAXA (Japan Space Agency) – was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on November 15, 2020, propelled by a SpaceX missile, the Falcon 9.
The crew called the return capsule “Flexibility”.
The mission was part of NASA’s fledgling public-private partnership with SpaceX, the rocket company that Musk founded in 2002, who is also the CEO of Tesla Inc. For the manufacture of electric cars.
Reuters report by Francis Kerry
