SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts arrive home with rare pre-dawn splashdown in Gulf of Mexico

Four astronauts strapped into their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged to a fiery pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, closing out the first operational flight of SpaceX's futuristic touch-screen ferry ship.

Crew-1 commander Michael Hopkins, along with NASA astronauts Victor Glover and Shannon Walker and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, disconnected from the space-facing port of the station's forward Harmony module at 8:35 p.m. EDT Saturday. That set up only the second piloted water landing for NASA's post-shuttle commercial crew program and just the third night splashdown in space history — the first in nearly 45 years.