SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – After spending five months in space, four astronauts on the latest NASA mission splashed down safely in the water off San Diego.
But the Earth’s a big place with a whole lot of water, so how was it picked to land here?
"They look at the re-entry and the splashdown along a narrow, it’s a very time-dependent sort of corridor of the ground track,” Aaron Rosengren of UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering said.
Rosengren is an expert in the aerospace field. ABC 10News spoke with him about the successful splashdown off the coast of San Diego.
“The space ecosystem in Southern California is burgeoning right now. So, you know, that does play some role, probably with ground stations, coordinations, and the like,” Rosengren said. “But really, it was just a favorable season condition. The logistics worked out, and it was the best timing window that happened to line up. And this is the corridor that we re-entered in to.”
ABC 10News also reached out to NASA following the splashdown and asked why the water off the San Diego coast was designated the reentry point.
“After their long-duration mission completed, Crew-11 was the second NASA commercial crew mission to splash down in the Pacific Ocean. NASA and SpaceX worked together to certify and ensure readiness for Dragon recovery operations on the West Coast. Since 2019, Dragon recoveries primarily occurred off the Florida coast. SpaceX transitioned recovery operations to the West Coast to allow the spacecraft to complete deorbit before safely jettisoning the trunk over the Pacific Ocean,” Joseph Zakrzewski, Public Affairs Specialist with NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, said.
“Crew splashdown locations are near Los Angeles, Oceanside, and San Diego. The recovery vessel is stationed in Long Beach, California, to support these operations. To establish this capability and improve public safety, NASA and SpaceX spent months setting up new sites, obtaining regulatory approvals, performing engine assessments, implementing software changes, conducting tabletop exercises, and updating flight rules.”
Rosengren also broke down the relationship between NASA and SpaceX when it comes to the coordination of the reentry.
“NASA is the one that coordinates this, SpaceX is the one that executes it,” Rosengren said. “So, they execute the vehicle, the re-entry, the recovery operations, and I think NASA has flight rules and oversight for that comes into play.”
