The last Atlantic splashdown for half a century

The remaining days of the flight served as a ten-day trial of the Gumdrop module under conditions matching the length of a lunar journey. Among other tasks, the crew captured multispectral images of Earth using four simultaneous Hasselblad cameras — a technique that later informed the development of the Landsat satellite series.

The eighth and final SPS engine burn on 13 March set the ship on course for home. Splashdown was delayed one orbit because of bad weather in the planned zone — Apollo 9 finally came down in the Atlantic about 300 km east of the Bahamas, less than 5 km from the carrier USS Guadalcanal, after 10 days, 1 hour and just under a minute of flight.

It was the last spacecraft to splash down in the Atlantic for the next fifty years — until the Crew Dragon Demo-1 flight in 2019. Flight director Gene Kranz called the mission “sheer exhilaration,” and Apollo Program Director Samuel Phillips said it had “exceeded even our most optimistic expectations.” When Gumdrop and Spider redocked, Buzz Aldrin was watching from Mission Control — and later said he knew right then that Apollo 11 would attempt a Moon landing.

◉ Real photograph