SpaceX and NASA plan to bring Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken back Sunday afternoon in the company’s Dragon capsule, aiming for the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida Panhandle.
Hurley said if he and Behnken get sick while bobbing in the waves awaiting recovery, it won’t be the first time for a crew.
Astronauts returning in the early 1970s from Skylab, NASA’s first space station, did not feel well following splashdown, Hurley noted.
Feeling sick “is the way it is with a water landing,†he said during the crew’s final news conference from the International Space Station.
This will be SpaceX’s first splashdown with astronauts on board, ending a two-month test flight that began May 30 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center — the first launch of a crew from the U.S.
The capsule has been docked at the space station since May 31, allowing Hurley and Behnken to chip in with spacewalks and experiments.
Launch and rendezvous went flawlessly, “so we expect nothing different for the splashdown,†he said.
After splashdown, it will take an hour or so before the capsule is hauled by crane onto a SpaceX recovery ship, where the hatch will be opened and the astronauts will get out.
The plan is for the Dragon to undock from the space station on Saturday, a day before splashdown.
“We won’t leave the space station without some good landing opportunities in front of us, good splashdown weather,†Behnken told reporters.
Like launch, the ride back will be essentially automated, with the crew and flight controllers intervening only if necessary.
Behnken said even before his launch, they had an inkling she would be assigned to a SpaceX flight.
NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing for U.S.-based crew transport after the space shuttles retired in 2011
Russian rockets were the only way for astronauts to get to the space station until SpaceX became the first private company to launch humans into orbit two months ago
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