In recent years, as SpaceX launched rocket after rocket without incident, liftoff became the company’s second-most-impressive feat. The truly dazzling moment came after the rocket had left the ground, and its booster—or, sometimes, two boosters—reversed course high up in the air, flipped around, and glided back down, landing upright on the ground or a barge floating in the Atlantic Ocean, ready to be refurbished and used again. What once seemed like science fiction has become a SpaceX signature.
From now on, SpaceX has claim to another enduring image of the new era in spaceflight: a quartet of parachutes in the sky over open water, with a capsule dangling below, delivering passengers safely home from space.
This is how two NASA astronauts returned to Earth Sunday afternoon after spending more than two months living and working on the International Space Station. The SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in still waters in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coast of Florida. Its passengers, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, bobbed inside the capsule—which was so charred from the fiery fall through the atmosphere that it looked more like a toasted marshmallow—until recovery ships arrived and tugged them to safety.
The last time NASA astronauts made a watery return like this was in 1975, at the end of the Apollo era, after a rendezvous with Soviet cosmonauts high above Earth. American spaceflight has changed so much since then—the propulsion systems that power the missions are more sophisticated, the people who fly them are more likely to be women, and competition among spacefaring countries has become friendlier. Perhaps one of the most significa ..
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