SpaceX making 1st US crew splashdown in dark since Apollo 8

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — SpaceX this weekend will attempt the first U.S. splashdown of returning astronauts in darkness since the Apollo 8 moonshot in 1968.

Elon Musk’s company is targeting the predawn hours of Sunday to bring back three NASA astronauts and one from Japan, after dangerously high wind scuttled a pair of earlier attempts.

The astronauts — only the second crew to fly SpaceX — will depart the International Space Station on Saturday night aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule that carried them up last November. They’ll aim for a splashdown 6 1/2 hours later, around 3 a.m. in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida.

SpaceX brought back a station cargo capsule with a splashdown in darkness in January. That adds to NASA's confidence for a nighttime homecoming, said Rob Navias, a spokesman at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“SpaceX has done numerous dress rehearsals and spent a lot of time with nighttime recoveries,” he said.

Navias said the time slot provided the best weather conditions in the coming days.

The capsule carrying Apollo 8's three astronauts — the first men to fly to the moon — splashed into the Pacific near Hawaii before dawn on Dec. 27, 1968.

The Russians also had one crew splashdown in darkness, back in 1976. The two-man capsule could not dock to the Soviet Union's Salyut 5 space station as intended and had to make a hasty return, ending up in a partially frozen lake in Kazakhstan — in the middle of a blizzard. It took hours for recovery teams to rescue the cosmonauts.

Even with the early hour, the Coast Guard promises to have more patrols to keep sightseers at a safe distance. On a Sunday afternoon last August, pleasure boaters swarmed the capsule that parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico with the first SpaceX crew.

The...