Video: Round Trip Success - SpaceX Dragon Capsule Splash Down! (May 31, 2012)
Thursday, May 31, 2012 at 09:56PM
The SpaceX Dragon capsule was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket on May 22nd, and after spending 5 days connected to the ISS (delivering cargo on a test mission) Dragon returned to Earth today (May 31, 2012) with a successful splashdown southwest of California in the Pacific Ocean. An excellent end to an excellent mission!
The video above is pretty much all that's available at the moment of the descent under parachutes for Dragon... it's not fast paced or very good quality imagery, but I'd like to think they spent the money on the spacecraft hardware rather than on the expensive task of trying to capture high quality video of the splashdown. My understanding is that you never know exactly where the capsule will land, so being in the right place at the right time is very difficult. What's important is that this re-usable spacecraft, designed and built by a private company, has proven itself to be up to the task on every front in its first ISS demonstration. Bravo SpaceX!
The much nicer video below shows a test drop of the Dragon capsule in August 2010 from an Erikson Air-Crane at 14,000 off the coast of Morro Bay, California. This video gives an excellent idea of what today's successful recovery likely looked like. Very impressive stuff!
NOTE: the video above is a test drop from 2010 and not the splashdown from today.
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