SpaceX craft safely brings NASA crew back home

WASHINGTON－The United States' first crewed spaceship to fly to the International Space Station in nearly a decade returned safely to Earth on Sunday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico.

The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed into the water off Pensacola, Florida at 2:48 pm, trailed by its four main parachutes.

It was the first water landing for a crewed US spaceship since the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission.

"It's truly our honor and privilege," said pilot Doug Hurley, who was joined on the mission by commander Robert Behnken.

"On behalf of the NASA and SpaceX teams, welcome back to planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX," replied SpaceX's Mike Heiman, to laughter in the control room.

A flotilla of civilian boats swarmed over the landing zone as a recovery ship sped to the scorched capsule and hoisted it aboard with its crane.

The hatch opening was briefly delayed as a team worked to stop a leak of rocket fuel vapor, but around an hour after splashdown, the astronauts exited the capsule and headed for shore on a helicopter.

They were reunited with their families in Houston, where they walked off a plane－in apparently good physical shape and upbeat spirits－at a military base.

Addressing a socially distanced welcoming ceremony in a hangar, Behnken, a veteran of the Space Shuttle program, praised the SpaceX team behind the successful mission.

"There's something special about having that capability to launch and bring your own astronauts home," he said.

A visibly excited SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the mission heralded a new era.

"We're going to go to the moon, we're going to have a base on the moon, we're going to Mars," he said. "I'm not very religious but I prayed for this one."

The United States has had to rely on Russia for rides to space since the last Space Shuttle flew in 2011.

The mission is also a huge win for Musk's SpaceX, which was founded only in 2002 but has leapfrogged its way past Boeing, its main competitor in the commercial space race.

'Space taxi' contracts

The US has paid the two companies a total of about $7 billion for their "space taxi" contracts, though aerospace giant Boeing's efforts have badly floundered.

The Crew Dragon capsule performed several precisely choreographed sequences in order to return home safely.

First, it jettisoned its "trunk "that contains its power, heat and other systems, which burned up in the atmosphere.

The capsule then fired its thrusters to maneuver itself into the proper orbit and trajectory for the splashdown.

It deployed two sets of parachutes on its descent, bringing its speed down as it hit the Gulf of Mexico.

The last time NASA astronauts returned from space to water was in 1975, in the Pacific, the scene of most splashdowns, to end a joint mission known as Apollo-Soyuz.

The Mercury and Gemini crews in the early to mid-1960s parachuted into the Atlantic, while most of the later Apollo capsules hit the Pacific.

The capsule will now undergo a six-week inspection to certify the vessel as worthy of future low-Earth orbit missions.

The next mission－dubbed Crew-1－will involve a team of four: three NASA astronauts along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency mission specialist Soichi Noguchi.

Takeoff is set for late September, and the crew are due to spend six months on the space station.

Agencies Via Xinhua