the.com/splashdown
the only landing where the ocean catches you before the cameras do
means The landing of a spacecraft by parachute into the ocean, where it floats until recovery ships arrive.
from A 20th-century American spaceflight coinage, built plainly from 'splash' plus 'down' on the model of earlier landing words like 'touchdown.' It rose to fame in the 1960s with NASA's Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions, whose capsules came home by parachute into the sea — 'splash' being onomatopoeic, an old echo-word for water suddenly disturbed, cousin to 'plash' and 'splatter.'
- navy escort
- Warships once raced to recover capsules and crews
- apollo legacy
- All early US astronauts came home wet, not dry
- shuttle skipped it
- Shuttles landed on runways for thirty years
- spacex revival
- Crew Dragon brought splashdowns back in 2020
- helicopter days
- Choppers plucked floating astronauts straight from the waves
apollo 11 splashdown — moon mission crew returned to pacific ocean, july 24 1969
spacex crew dragon endeavour — commercial crew returned to gulf of mexico, august 2 2020
soyuz ms-09 landing — iss crew landed in kazakhstan steppe via parachute, june 6 2018