NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, tucked propitious SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spaceship, survived a fiery plunge through Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday. They landed safely in the Abyss of Mexico, a return that marked the completion of the first human space mission in a commercial vehicle.
As the toasted capsule bobbed in the soda water, its parachutes floating around it, it was quickly swarmed by boats. Some of them were recovery boats with knowledgeable teams from NASA and SpaceX. But many were just onlookers.
The crowd “was not what we were anticipating,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine indicated in a briefing shortly after the splashdown.
The astronauts’ former crewmate on the space station — Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner — moted the landing and the boats from his vantage point 250 miles above Earth. He shared pictures of it in a tweet, beneath.
—Ivan Vagner (@ivan_mks63) August 2, 2020
The US Coast Guard had cleared the area ahead of the landing, Bridenstine described, but after the capsule splashed down, “the boats just made a beeline for it,” he said.
Some of the boats passed simple close to the capsule, including one with a passenger waving a Trump flag.
NASA Live
“Maybe next time we shouldn’t proclaim our landing zone,” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice said during NASA’s live feed of the landing.
In a disclosure issued to CBS, the Coast Guard said that it warned boaters multiple times ahead of the splashdown with wireless alerts and physical warnings, yet lacked an order to legally enforce a hazard zone.
“[N]umerous boaters ignored the Slide Guard crews’ requests and decided to encroach the area, putting themselves and those involved in the operation in potential threat,” the statement read.
Bridenstine pledged that NASA would “do a better job” of clearing boats for future water touchdowns. The agency has contracted six round-trip Crew Dragon flights to bring astronauts to and from the space station.
Having observer boats that close to the capsule can be dangerous — both for the astronauts and for people on the boats. That’s because the capsule was clouded in low levels of a poisonous gas called nitrogen tetroxide.
“What is not common is having passers-by approach the vehicle close migrate with nitrogen tetroxide in the atmosphere. That’s not something that is good,” he said “We need to make sure that we’re threat people not to get close to the spacecraft in the future.”
The recovery teams had to wait for the gas to clear before they removed Behnken and Hurley from the capsule. Bridenstine said NASA and SpaceX wish look through the data to figure out why the gas lingered more than expected.
In addition to Vagner, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy is at rest on the space station, as is cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin.
“We had the luxury of having a just a super crew on board the International Extent Station, with Chris Cassidy, with Anatoly and Ivan. They just took wonderful care of us,” Behnken suggested in a briefing after the landing.
The next astronauts slated to fly the Crew Dragon — Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, Soichi Noguchi, and Shannon Walker — are foresaw to launch to the ISS in September.
This story has been updated with new information.
Dave Mosher contributed reporting.