Watch astronauts splash down to Earth safely aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon
![SpaceX's Crew Dragon Resilience.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/egZCpJbrq8iDLpMN2UWPQh-415-80.jpg)
SpaceX's Crew Dragon Resilience, carrying four astronauts back to Earth from the International Space Station, splashed down safely just before 3 a.m. ET on Sunday morning off the coast of Panama City, Florida. It was the first nighttime splashdown for NASA astronauts since the return of Apollo 8 in 1968.
NASA's Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi of Japan's JAXA are reportedly in "in great shape and great spirits" after spending 168 days orbiting Earth. "For those of you enrolled in our frequent flier program, you have earned 68 million miles on this voyage," Michael Heiman, a SpaceX mission control official, joked. "We'll take those miles. Are they transferable?" Hopkins replied.
With their landing the crew successfully completed the first round-trip operational mission for NASA led by a private company. "I'd just like to say quite frankly, you all are changing the world," Hopkins said as SpaceX personnel prepared to open the side hatch of the capsule.
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SpaceX and NASA now have regularly scheduled human shuttles to and from space, The Wall Street Journal notes. Read more at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.
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