Garmaine asked 4 years ago
Some of the coverage of the last flight of an original Dragon freighter mention that the coming Dragon 2 will be able to land in the Atlantic, with resulting advantages:
Beginning with the CRS-21 mission late this year, the new Dragon 2 cargo capsules will splash down under parachutes in the Atlantic Ocean east of Florida, rather than the current recovery zone in the Pacific Ocean west of Baja California. It takes a day or two for Dragon capsules to get back to port in California on SpaceX recovery ships. That transit time will be cut with splashdowns in the Atlantic.
“When they do that, they’ll be a matter of hours from the port,” said Kenny Todd, NASA’s manager of International Space Station operations and integration, last month. “So that will allow us to get this critical science back in the investigators’ hands much quicker.”
(From Spaceflight Now)
What is it about Dragon 2 that allows landing in the Atlantic? Alternately, was there something that required Original Dragon to land in the Pacific?
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