Private crew splashes down off Florida coast
The private Axiom Space astronauts who spent eight days at the International Space Station climbed into their ride home to Earth, making a late-night splashdown off the coast of Florida aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom late Tuesday night.
“SpaceX, we’d really like to tell you that was a phenomenal ride. We really enjoyed all of it. Every bit,” said the Ax-2 mission commander Peggy Whitson after landing at 11:04 p.m. in the Gulf of Mexico near Panama City to complete a nearly 10-day mission since launching from Kennedy Space Center on May 21. The capsule was brought on board a recovery ship with the crew getting an assist off the spacecraft less than an hour later.
Whitson, pilot John Shoffner and mission specialists Ali Alqarni and Rayyanah Barnawi of the Saudi Space Commission spent Memorial Day packing up the Crew Dragon capsule before taking their seats aboard for Tuesday morning’s hatch closure and departure from the station at 11:05 a.m.
Freedom, completing its second flight, made the 12-hour trip, bringing home the crew as well as 300 pounds of cargo and 20 science experiments. The final hour of the voyage saw it slow from 17,500 mph with temperatures reaching near 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit while reaching a final, gentle, 10-mph parachute-assisted splashdown.
The landing came three years to the day since the first crewed flight of a SpaceX Crew Dragon on Demo-2. The spacecraft has now completed its 10th flight with humans on board transporting 38 humans to orbit.
Two of those flights have been for Axiom Space, which partnered with SpaceX and NASA for its first mission in 2022, Ax-1. The short stays on the ISS with three of the four seats going to paying customers are part of Axiom’s plans to eventually build out its own space station starting with a module to be connected to the ISS as early as 2025.
The Ax-1 seats went for $55 million each, but the price for the Ax-2 seats was not revealed.
Whitson, a former NASA astronaut and now Axiom Space employee became the first female commander of a commercial space mission and added onto her American record for most time in space, which now stands at more than 674 days.