CAPE CANAVERAL, Fl. (AP) – This weekend, SpaceX will attempt the first U.S. crash of returning astronauts into darkness since the Apollo 8 moonlight in 1968.
Elon Musk’s company is set to arrive on Sunday night to rescue three NASA astronauts, one of them from Japan Aponia, after a dangerous strong wind disrupted several previous attempts.
The astronauts, the only crew to fly on SpaceX alone, will leave the International Space Station on Saturday night in the SpaceX Dragon capsule, which they held in November last year. They will aim to shake at 6 1/2 hours, at 3 am, in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Panama, Florida.
In January, SpaceX brought back the station’s cargo capsule, shaking in the dark. That boosts NASA’s confidence to return home overnight, said Rob Navias, a spokesman for the John Onson Space Center in Houston.
“SpaceX has experimented with a lot of costumes, spent a lot of time with nighttime recovery,” she said.
Navias said the timeline provides the best weather for the coming days.
The capsule carrying the three Apollo 8 astronauts, the first humans to fly to the moon, was scattered near the Hawaiian Islands before dawn on December 27, 1968.
The Russians had one crew sink in the dark in 1976. The two-person capsule could not enter the Soviet Union’s Salyut 5 space station as intended, and had to return in a hurry to a partially frozen lake in Kazakhstan, Kazakhstan. in the middle of a snowstorm. Recovery teams took hours to rescue the astronauts.
Even in the early hours, Coast Guard promises to have more patrols to keep attractions safe. Last Sunday afternoon, fun-loving sailors filled the capsule with the first SpaceX crew to parachute into the Gulf of Mexico.
The departure of NASA’s Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover և Shannon Walker ացի Japanese Soichi Noguchi will remain at the space station for seven. Their replacements, representing the United States, Japan Aponia and France, arrived last weekend in their own SpaceX capsule on a six-month mission. The other three crew members, one American and two Russians, were launched from Azerbaijan three weeks ago in a Russian capsule.
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