At 4:07 a.m. ET., privately-owned space transport company SpaceX successfully detached its Dragon capsule from the International Space Station and began its descent towards Earth. About seven and a half hours later, the capsule splashed into the Pacific Ocean a couple hundred miles off the coast of Southern California.
The return of the Dragon (someone at SpaceX is a clever Bruce Lee fan) marks the first time a non-government organization has successfully completed a mission to the International Space Station. As reported by Mashable, SpaceX has a 4-year, $1.6 billion contract with NASA to transport cargo, supplies, and maybe someday astronauts to the Space Station.
"NASA's plan is to allow private space companies such as SpaceX to handle resupply shipments to the ISS," says Mashable on their website, "freeing up its own resources to focus on missions to Mars or near-Earth asteroids. SpaceX also has plans to eventually ferry astronauts to the space station and back."
Watch the Dragon detach from the ISS and begin its descent in this footage from NASA:
