On May 2 at 02:37 UTC, Crew Dragon Resilience undocked from the ISS after 169 days in space. Onboard were Expedition 64/Crew-1 astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Soichi Noguchi, and Shannon Walker. Originally scheduled for April 28, the undocking was pushed back several days due to bad weather in the recovery zone in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coast of the Florida Panhandle. 

On May 2, the undock-minus-six-hours weather briefing was good, and the crew suited up and boarded the capsule. Once the hooks on the SpaceX Docking System were driven out, Crew Dragon Resilience performed a burn with its Draco thrusters to begin moving away from the docking port. Because the capsule departed during orbital night, each of the thruster burns was clearly visible on the NASA webcast.

Once the Crew Dragon was safely away from the ISS, it performed three more burns using all of its thrusters to increase the rate of departure from the ISS. Then Resilience spent the next few orbits ten kilometers below the ISS preparing for the deorbit burn. This burn lasted sixteen minutes and 23 seconds and set the capsule up for a precision landing just off the coast of Panama City, Florida. An image from ESA astronaut ThomasPesquet taken aboard the ISS shows the bright streak of Resilience reentering the atmosphere in the Gulf of Mexico.

The NASA webcast used the infrared camera on a WB-57 aircraft to track the capsule through the entry, drogue chute deploy, and the main chute deploy, and the feed showed the trail of the capsule through reentry all the way down to splashdown. Splashdown happened at 07:56 UTC, early morning local time.

Crew Dragon Resilience was quickly lifted out of the water in the pitch darkness and hoisted onto the deck of GO Navigator, the primary recovery vessel. First, a small boat headed to the capsule, and a specially trained crewmember climbed on top of the just-landed capsule and attached a lift harness. Right before the capsule was lifted out of the water, the specialist jumped into the water and was picked up by the small boat.

This was the first night recovery of an American crewed spacecraft since the recovery of Apollo 8 in 1968. The four astronauts, Noguchi, Walker, Glover, and Hopkins, were all smiles and thumbs up after they disembarked the capsule.

After a medical check in GO Navigator’s onboard clinic, the crew members boarded a helicopter and were flown back to NASA Houston. GO Navigator and the capsule took the long way around the tip of Florida to Port Canaveral’s Poseidon Wharf. Because the Crew Dragon is still loaded with the hazardous hypergolic fuel used for its Draco and SuperDraco thrusters, the capsule is being taken to Poseidon Wharf rather than the usual North Cargo pier as Poseidon is more isolated in case anything goes wrong. 

Once unloaded from GO Navigator, Resilience will be taken to the Crew Dragon processing facility at Area 58 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to off-load the hypergolic fuel and undergo further processing and preparation for its next trip to space. The capsule’s next flight is already penciled in for no earlier than September 2021 on the Inspiration 4 mission, which will be the first all civilian space mission.

More Information

NASA press release