NASA astronauts’ descent: ‘Spaceship was like an animal’

The two NASA astronauts brought back to Earth on Sunday said they felt they were inside the belly of a beast as it careened into the atmosphere at 28,000km/h.

NASA astronaut Douglas Hurley is helped out of the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft after landing in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday. Picture: AFP

SpaceX’s crewed ­capsule isn’t called Dragon for nothing.

The two NASA astronauts brought back to Earth on Sunday said they felt they were inside the belly of a beast as it careened into the atmosphere at 28,000km/h.

“It came alive,” said mission commander Bob Behnkhen in Houston on Wednesday AEST.

The thrusters were firing to keep the capsule, called Endeavour, pointed precisely at its target site off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, for the first water landing by a US spaceship since 1975.

“The atmosphere starts to make noise, you can hear that rumble outside the vehicle and as the vehicle tries to control, you feel a little bit of that shimmy in your body,” the 50-year-old said, two days after returning from a six-month stay on the International Space Station.

“It doesn’t sound like a ­machine, it sounds like an animal coming through the atmosphere with all the puffs that are happening from the thrusters and the ­atmospheric noise.”

Not only was ride down deafening, but each time the vessel carried out descent sequences like jettisoning its “trunk” that contained the power system and ­firing parachutes, it was also bone-jarring.

“Very much like getting hit in the back of the chair with a baseball bat, you know, just a crack,” Behnken said.

Behnken and crewmate Doug Hurley, 53, are best friends and are married to fellow astronauts.  The success of the demonstration mission for SpaceX Crew Dragon, the first crewed US spaceship to achieve orbit since the Space Shuttle era, means it will likely soon be certified for regular service.

The next mission is already planned for September.

“The mission went just like the simulators, from start to finish. All the way, there was really no surprises,” Hurley said.

Both men are veterans of the Space Shuttle program, which ended in 2011, and they had been training for five years with ­SpaceX.

Splashdown at 24km/h in the Gulf of Mexico felt “pretty firm”, but was expected, Hurley said.

One person who will particularly benefit from Behnken’s knowledge: his astronaut wife Megan McArthur, who is slated to make the same voyage in the northern spring of next year, on the same spacecraft.

AFP