Gus Grissom climbed out of his Mercury capsule on July 21, 1961, and swam for his life. The hatch of Liberty Bell 7 had blown off while he waited for a helicopter. Seawater poured over the sill, the capsule filled, and it sank 17,700 feet to the Atlantic floor. Grissom was pulled out, and later inquiries found he had played no part in the hatch blowing, AmericaSpace reported.
The episode shows what the United States has accepted for six decades: American crews come home by dropping into the sea.
Why water
The logic is simple. A parachute slows a capsule, and the ocean takes up the rest of the blow. “Water acts as a natural cushion, reducing the impact force on astronauts compared to a hard ground landing,” NASA experts said, as quoted by the Hindustan Times in July 2025. A capsule that lands on water also does not need heavy landing gear, which makes the spacecraft lighter and lowers the risk of structural damage on the way down. NASA has used the method since Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.
A record of rough landings
Between Al Shepard’s 15-minute hop on May 5, 1961, and the Apollo-Soyuz mission, 43 American astronauts came down in the ocean, AmericaSpace counted. Shepard’s was smooth. Others were not.
Scott Carpenter fired his retrorockets three seconds late, and his Aurora 7 capsule overshot the target zone by 250 miles. He sat in the water for more than an hour before the destroyer John R. Pierce reached him, and news reports meanwhile suggested he might be dead.
Apollo 8 came back from lunar orbit on December 27, 1968, at 21,685 mph and splashed down in the dark Pacific. Apollo 11’s command module hit the water hard in July 1969, and swells off Hawaii flipped it upside down, leaving Neil Armstrong, Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin hanging in their harnesses until airbags on the nose turned it upright. On August 7, 1971, one of Apollo 15’s three main parachutes failed to deploy.
From October 1968 to July 1975, another 15 crews splashed down: nine returning from the Moon, three from an Earth-circling space station and one from the joint flight with the Soviet Union. The last of those, Tom Stafford, Vance Brand and Deke Slayton on July 24, 1975, was the last American ocean landing for almost five decades.
The method returns
That gap closed on August 2, 2020, when Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken brought SpaceX’s Dragon Endeavour down in the Atlantic, the 32nd American crew to land at sea. The practice has continued with commercial crews. In July 2025 the Hindustan Times reported that Dragon, carrying the Axiom Mission 4 crew including India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, would descend into the Pacific off California. It added that NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore had also returned by splashdown.
Afterward, the Indian Space Research Organisation said, the crew would spend about seven days in rehabilitation under a flight surgeon to readjust to Earth’s gravity.
Sources
- Splashdown vs touchdown: Why the spacecraft carrying Shubhanshu Shukla will land on water | Hindustan Times
- Landing in "The Drink": Remembering America's Oceanic Returns from Space (Part 1) – AmericaSpace
- Landing in "The Drink": Remembering America's Oceanic Returns from Space (Part 2) – AmericaSpace
