Splashdown

Splashdown is the method of landing a spacecraft in a body of water, usually by parachute. The method has been used primarily by American crewed capsules including NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Orion along with the private SpaceX Dragon. It is also possible for the Russian Soyuz and the Chinese Shenzhou crewed capsules to land in water, though this is only a contingency.

As the name suggests, the capsule parachutes into an ocean or other large body of water. The properties of water cushion the spacecraft enough that there is no need for a braking rocket to slow the final descent as is the case with Russian and Chinese crewed space capsules or airbags as is the case with the Boeing Starliner crewed space capsule.

The American practice came in part because American launch sites are on the coastline and launch primarily over water.^[1] Russian launch sites are far inland and most early launch aborts were likely to descend on land.^{[citation needed]}