Cape Canaveral (Florida), May 31 (AP): The world’s first commercial space cargo carrier returned to Earth today, ending its revolutionary voyage to the International Space Station with an old-fashioned splashdown in the Pacific
The unmanned SpaceX Dragon capsule parachuted into the ocean about 800km off Mexico’s Baja California, bringing back more than a half-tonne of old station equipment. It was the first time the US space agency, Nasa, received a large load from the orbiting space station since its space shuttles stopped flying last year.
Today’s dramatic return capped a test mission that was virtually flawless, beginning with the May 22 launch aboard the SpaceX company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Florida and continuing through the space station docking three days later and the departure just six hours before it hit the water.
“Splashdown successful!!” SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, said via Twitter from the company’s Mission Control at its California headquarters.
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| The Dragon spacecraft floats in the Pacific Ocean after its return to Earth. (Reuters) |
The bell-shaped Dragon resembled Nasa’s Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft of the 1960s and 1970s, but it symbolises the future for American space travel. Musk aims to launch the next supply mission in September under a steady contract with Nasa, and says astronauts can be riding Dragons to and from the space station in as little as three or four years.
The Dragon represents Nasa’s future as laid out by President Barack Obama. He wants routine orbital flights turned over to private business so the space agency can work on getting astronauts to asteroids and Mars.
Nasa astronauts are now forced to hitch rides on Russian rockets from Kazakhstan, an expensive and embarrassing outsourcing after a half-century of manned launches from US soil. It will be up to SpaceX to pick up the reins.
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