A pod of curious dolphins showed up to greet the returning SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts shortly after they splashed down off the coast of Florida at about 6 p.m. ET on Tuesday, March 18.
The four-person crew included NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who ended up staying in orbit for way longer than originally planned.
As the main recovery vessel approached SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, overhead cameras caught the pod of inquisitive dolphins swimming close to the spacecraft.
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“Here on the screen we can see … dolphins, actually, who want to come and play with Dragon,” the livestream commentator, SpaceX engineering manager Kate Tice, said with some surprise.
The dolphins stuck around for quite a while, too, as the recovery team worked on lifting the Crew Dragon capsule onto the main boat before returning to land.
“Wow, we’ve got a cute little pod of dolphins, it wasn’t just one or two,” Tice noted as the creatures bobbed about in the water.
A short while later, the overhead camera tried to capture a clearer shot of the sea creatures. “Ah, dolphin cam back again,” Tice quipped.
Still, you can understand the dolphins’ curiosity. After all, it’s not every day that a space capsule lands in your neighborhood.
It’s even possible that Williams and Wilmore — along with fellow NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — may have caught a glimpse of the dolphins through the windows of the Crew Dragon in what would surely have been a fitting finale to a most unusual space mission.