The astronauts, who flew to the ISS as part of the SpaceX Crew-3 mission, are returning to Earth after nearly six months in the orbital laboratory. They exploded safely in the Gulf of Mexico aboard the Crew Dragon Endurance, which made its debut flight with the same astronauts in November 2021, on May 6 at 12:43 pm ET – and NASA shot a very spectacular night video of the event.
As you can see, the Endurance capsule looks particularly bright in the infrared, most likely because it has reached a temperature of about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit when it enters the atmosphere. The recovery team pulled NASA astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer from the capsule shortly after the crash. Marshburn is the only veteran astronaut of the four, and he completed his fifth spacewalk during the mission. This was the ISS’s first mission for the other three, with Maurer being only the second ESA astronaut to fly aboard the Dragon capsule.
The Crew-3 astronauts spent 177 days in orbit and began their stay with a bang. Shortly after arriving at the station, all the astronauts on board had to seek safety on their transport ship when the ISS passed dangerously close to a field of orbital debris. The US State Department later said the wreckage came from a test of a Russian missile that destroyed one of the country’s own satellites.
SpaceX’s next manned mission to the ISS is scheduled to launch in September with two NASA astronauts, one JAXA astronaut and a Russian astronaut. This will be the fifth flight of NASA’s commercial crew so far since the Crew-4 was launched to the station in April.
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