SpaceX Crew Dragon Splashdown

[tyrteg]

So... anyone watching?
2020 brought a lot of pretty s*itty things but one thing that's really keeping my spirits high is the Crew Demo 2. Seeing American astronauts return to space on top of SpaceX rocket was awesome. I've been watching SpaceX launches ever since 2015 and their first successful vertical landing with Falcon 9 Full Thrust and it feels way longer than half a decade since that day to nowadays when we're watching Falcon 9 - launched Dragon capsule splashing down in the sea.
It's great to see another great step towards that Roddenberry Star Trek future happening in real time. And in much clearer colors than the Moon Landing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSJIQftoxeU

[Madner Kami]

You do realize, that it's 2020? I don't want to watch the thing fall out of the sky, explode on impact, hitting a fault line while doing that and thus creating the biggest series of earthquakes ever encountered by humanity (including the geological record uncovered by us), that ends with California splitting off of the continental US and Japan drowning in lava in realtime. No thank you, sir.

[tyrteg]

Heh - nice one. Although they are landing near Florida. And who needs Florida anyway? Apart from Hawaiian-shirt sellers and the beach-volleyball industry?
Jokes aside - they launched quite fine so I'm pretty sure the Endeavor Capsule is not playing by year 2020 rules.

EDIT: Also I just want to say it's really great to see this flight's SpaceX and NASA commentators. Not only are they not the old-school boring white rich dudes with Oxford accents in suits - it's a bald guy with a respectable neck-beard in a NASA-labeled lab coat and a pretty lady - who also happens to be one of the chief SpaceX engineers as she demonstrated quite aptly by answering viewer's questions about the Crew Dragon's design. THAT's the kind of diversity I want to see more often.

[Riedquat]

As much as I grumble about everything modern (loathing a large part of it) anything involved in the exploration of space is a definite plus for humanity.

[tyrteg]

Nice! They have landed successfully!
First commercial crew mission - and first splash landing of US capsule since Apollo program - successful. Looking forward to the next one in September and fun fact - next year in February is another flight - this time with the wife of one of the astronauts who just landed - Megan McArthur also happens to be an astronaut in her own right. Also two space tourist missions for next year. Seems we're back in space for real this time. And not just relying on some government official who gets replaced every 4 years.

[Laeril]

My mom was so happy watching both the launch and the splashdown. She's about as young as a person can be to have watched the Apollo 11 moon landing and remember it well, and she was in college when the Challenger disaster happened. She's always been a big fan of NASA and was really sad when the space shuttles were retired. Now that we are back in the game via SpaceX, she is overjoyed.

I grew up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and I remember elementary school teachers showing the shuttle launches during school. I'm not sure how old I was when we went to the Kennedy Space Center as a family (I want to say ten or eleven), but I do remember touching a piece of moon rock that was on display and thinking "I just touched something that came from the moon with my own hands" and realizing how amazing that sentence was. Hopefully when I have kids, they'll get to touch both moon rock and Martian rock and have the same sort of thoughts.