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The archetypal ngo for SpaceX's newest Dragon unit capsule could hardly person gone much smoothly.
The spacecraft, named Freedom, flew SpaceX's Crew-4 astronaut ngo to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA, which wrapped up Friday day (Oct. 14) with a splashdown successful the Atlantic Ocean disconnected the seashore of Jacksonville, Florida.
Freedom's instrumentality to Earth went similar clockwork, arsenic did beauteous overmuch the full mission, NASA and SpaceX representatives said.
Related: Amazing photos of SpaceX's Crew-4 mission
"From my perspective, watching the conveyance information those 5 and a fractional months was delightfully boring, portion the unit got to bash each the breathtaking enactment onboard ISS," Sarah Walker, SpaceX's manager of Dragon ngo management, said during a post-splashdown quality league connected Friday evening.
"That's precisely however we similar it," Walker added. "The Freedom conveyance performed beautifully the full time, and particularly contiguous connected on the time of its return."
Crew-4 lifted disconnected atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket connected April 27, carrying NASA astronauts Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins and the European Space Agency's Samantha Cristoforetti toward the orbiting lab.
Freedom arrived astatine the ISS that aforesaid day, and its crewmembers rapidly got to work. The Crew-4 astronauts completed "over 250 investigations successful areas of quality probe exertion demonstrations that we'll request for exploration, arsenic good arsenic completing immoderate of our low Earth orbit commercialization activities," Joel Montalbano, NASA's ISS programme manager, said during Friday evening's quality conference.
The spaceflyers' travel backmost to Earth Friday was notable arsenic well, and not conscionable for its smoothness: Freedom splashed down little than 5 hours aft undocking from the ISS.
"This was really the fastest instrumentality we've done connected a unit ngo — connected immoderate ngo — to date," Walker said.
SpaceX inactive has a ngo connected the ISS, and volition for a while; the four-person Crew-5 arrived connected Oct. 6 aboard the Dragon Endurance, which besides flew the company's Crew-3 mission.
Like Crew-5, Crew-6 volition employment a seasoned Dragon capsule. That coming mission, which is scheduled to motorboat adjacent spring, volition alert connected the spacecraft Endeavour, Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said during Friday's briefing.
Endeavour flew SpaceX's first-ever astronaut mission, the Demo-2 formation to the ISS successful 2020, arsenic good arsenic Crew-2 and Axiom SpaceX's Ax-1 flight. The 17-day-long Ax-1, which took spot successful April of this year, was the archetypal all-private crewed ngo to the abstraction station.
Mike Wall is the writer of "Out There (opens successful caller tab)" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a publication astir the hunt for alien life. Follow him connected Twitter @michaeldwall (opens successful caller tab). Follow america connected Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens successful caller tab) or on Facebook (opens successful caller tab).
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