TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — There is a chance that you might have heard a loud boom on Friday morning. A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed down off the Florida coast, and its re-entry may have caused a sonic boom.
The four-man Axiom Mission 3 commercial crew undocked from the International Space Station early Wednesday and settled in for a 47-hour free flight to re-entry and splashdown along Florida’s coast.
Commander Michael López-Alegría, co-pilot Walter Villadei, project astronaut Marcus Wandt and mission specialist Alper Gezeravci were part of the Axiom Space-sponsored mission. The mission also made history as the first all-European commercial astronaut mission to the ISS.
The crew blasted off from Kennedy Space Center on Jan. 18 and docked at the ISS two days later. They were supposed to come back to Earth on Feb. 3 but their return was delayed due to bad weather in splashdown sites in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.
As the capsule made re-entry, you might have heard what sounded like a thunderclap. A sonic boom happens when an aircraft — or in this case, the Dragon capsule — surpasses the speed of sound.
Sonic booms are as loud as thunder or an explosion and are increasingly common along Florida’s Space Coast.
The European Space Agency said the crew splashed down off the coast of Daytona around 8:30 a.m. Friday.
NASA said the SpaceX Dragon returned with more than 550 pounds of science and supplies, including NASA experiments and hardware.
