SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts heading home to rare pre-dawn splashdown

Four astronauts aboard the International Space Station readied their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for undocking Saturday night, setting up a fiery plunge to a pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday to close 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, planned to undock from the space-facing port of the station's forward Harmony module at 8:35 p.m. EDT, setting up a splashdown in the Gulf south of Panama City, Florida, at about 2:57 a.m. Sunday. The Crew Dragon's return to Earth will mark only the second piloted water landing since SpaceX began launching astronauts last year in NASA's commercial crew program and just the third night splashdown in space history — the first in nearly 45 years.