SpaceX has safely delivered two astronauts back to Earth for NASA, following an historic two-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
With the help of four white and orange parachutes, test pilots Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico at 18:48 GMT on Sunday.
As soon as the capsule hit the water, the recovery crews went to work on retrieving the parachutes and saving the capsule so they could hoist it out of the water and extract the crew.
Both Hurley and Behnken reported feeling great after returning to Earth and were fully checked out by medical staff before flying home to Houston and their families.
Astronauts typically arrive on land, and this return was not only the first to splash down in the Gulf but also the first water landing since the end of the Apollo programme in the 1970s.
To prepare for the landing, NASA selected seven potential landing sites around the Florida Peninsula, with the preferred site being Cape Canaveral. But after a tropical storm formed in the Atlantic Ocean earlier this week, the teams had to turn their attention to Florida’s West Coast.
Pensacola was selected as the primary site on Saturday, shortly before the crew undocked from the space station. The weather conditions in Pensacola were pretty close to perfect on Sunday afternoon when the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
To begin their journey home, Hurley and Behnken undocked from the orbital outpost at 21:54 GMT on Saturday evening, with the capsule backing away from the station autonomously and kicking off its trip back to Earth right on schedule.
