The dolphins showed up to welcome the crew back to Earth. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
On March 18, the Crew-9 mission’s Dragon capsule, Freedom, finally returned to Earth. And when it did, it had a few surprising greeters.
“Wow!” SpaceX engineer Kate Tice exclaimed during the webcast of Crew-9’s entry, descent and landing. “We got a cute little pod of dolphins, not just one or two.”
Freedom landed in the Gulf of Mexico at just before 6 p.m, EDT. As the recovery vessels made their way towards it, the dolphins joined them, seemingly curious to see what all the commotion was about.
Freedom carried NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore and Russian space agency’s Aleksandr Gorbunov. The crew was returning from the International Space Station (ISS). Hague and Gorbunov had been up there since the tail end of September, while Williams and Wilmore reached the ISS in early June, hitching a ride on Boeing’s Starliner capsule, while Hague and Gorbunov rode up to the station aboard Freedom in late September, on the launch of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. The entire tale is a wild one.
“The Starliner mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but the capsule experienced issues with its propulsion system, delaying its departure from the ISS multiple times,” Space.com explained. “Finally, on Aug. 24, NASA decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which happened on Sept. 7, and put Williams and Wilmore on Freedom for the trip back home at the end of Crew-9’s orbital stay. That decision required taking two people off the original Crew-9 manifest (NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson) to save seats for the Starliner duo on the return to Earth. So Freedom lifted off last fall with only Hague and Gorbunov on board.”
That’s why all eyes were on the Crew-9’s splashdown, and the dolphins showing up to welcome them home seemed particularly fitting. Dolphins are curious animals, so it’s not surprising that they’d be interested in all the fuss, but it was likely a pretty incredible sight for the astronauts who had spent so much time away from Earth.
