SpaceX’s history-making Crew Dragon mission has come to a close two months after it began. Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley successfully landed in the Atlantic Ocean at 2:48PM Eastern after starting their return to Earth nearly 20 hours earlier. This completes the first crewed orbital flight using a private spacecraft, not to mention the first crewed spaceflight from the US since NASA retired the Space Shuttle in 2011. It’s also the first US splashdown in 45 years.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo reached space in December 2018 and represented the basic return to crewed US flights, but that was a suborbital trip.