Crew Dragon Demo-2

Douglas Hurley had brought the Space Shuttle home.

On 21 July 2011, he rode Atlantis to a stop at Kennedy Space Center — the last landing of the program. For nine years afterwards, American crews reached the International Space Station only by Russian Soyuz.

On 30 May 2020, Hurley returned to Launch Complex 39A. This time he flew as commander of Crew Dragon Endeavour, lifting off in the afternoon aboard a Falcon 9 with astronaut Robert Behnken. Demo-2 was the crewed flight test of SpaceX's Dragon 2 under NASA's Commercial Crew Program — the first time a privately developed spacecraft had carried humans to orbit.

The crew spent 63 days at the station before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico on 2 August 2020 — the first ocean recovery for a NASA crew since Apollo-Soyuz, forty-five years earlier.