It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s just SpaceX astronauts returning to Earth.
Eyewitness videos showed a SpaceX capsule streaking across the night skies of New Orleans on Monday evening as it made its way back to Earth after spending nearly 200 days in space.
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Four astronauts strapped inside the capsule splashed down safely in the Gulf of Mexico off the Florida coast, capping a six-month NASA science mission aboard the International Space Station and a daylong flight home.
The capsule parachuted into the sea as planned just after 10:30 p.m. EST on Monday, following a fiery re-entry descent through Earth’s atmosphere carried live by a NASA webcast.
This is the second “operational” space station team that NASA has launched aboard a SpaceX capsule since resuming human space flights from American soil last year, after a nine-year hiatus at the end of the U.S. space shuttle program in 2011.