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Crew-1 Marks the End of the Longest Mission on the ISS With a Splashdown

Crew-1 astronauts made waves in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, May 2nd, marking the end of NASA's first and longest-duration mission of a crewed American spacecraft to date.
NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, and Soichi Noguchi returned on May 2nd from the longest crewed-mission on the ISS 1 photo
Photo: NASA
Astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, as well as Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, landed in a parachute-assisted splashdown off the coast of Panama City, Florida at 2:56 a.m. EDT. The spacecraft and astronauts were successfully recovered by crews on SpaceX rescue vessels.

NASA's SpaceX Crew-1 took off on a Falcon 9 rocket from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida last year on November 15th. The next day, the crew Dragon Resilience was docking to the Harmony module's forward port of the space station.

On April 5th this year, after six months in space, the four astronauts boarded Resilience for a port relocation maneuver. The move allowed for the port to receive another four Crew-2 astronauts to ISS on April 24th.

Overall, Crew-1 traveled 71,242,199 miles during their 167 days stay and completed 2,688 orbits around our planet. The splashdown also broke the American crewed spacecraft mission duration record of 84 days, 1 hour, and 15 minutes, set by the Skylab crew in February 1974.

During their mission, the astronauts studied protein crystal development to advance new drug discoveries, robotic assistant technologies, developed crops, and tested a new method of producing semiconductor crystals.

They provided hundreds of images of Earth as part of the Crew Earth Observation investigation, one of the longest-running investigations aboard the space station that tracks natural disasters on Earth. The Crew-1 astronauts also had significant roles to play in five spacewalks outside the orbiting laboratory.

The second Commercial Crew Program splashdown took place just over a week after the launch of NASA's SpaceX Crew-2 flight, the second long-duration mission. The Crew-2 astronauts launched on April 23rd and will live and work on the ISS for about six months before returning to Earth. Crew-3, the next NASA and SpaceX crewed flight, is scheduled to launch later this year, no later than October 23rd.
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About the author: Florina Spînu
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Florina taught herself how to drive in a Daewoo Tico (a rebadged Suzuki Alto kei car) but her first "real car" was a VW Golf. When she’s not writing about cars, drones or aircraft, Florina likes to read anything related to space exploration and take pictures in the middle of nature.
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