Where did the astronauts land?

The U.S. program began with splashdowns. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo descended by parachute into the ocean, where Navy ships awaited them; the Apollo 11 crew came down in the Pacific on July 24, 1969, and was recovered by the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Water absorbs impact energy well and avoids the need to reinforce the structure for a landing on hard ground.

SpaceX revived the method with Crew Dragon: in its early years, the capsules splashed down off the coast of Florida, in the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico, with recovery ships deployed depending on the weather. Starting in 2025 the company moved splashdowns to the Pacific, off California, so that the trunk module breaks up over the ocean rather than over land.

The Soviet school opted for dry land from the start. Soyuz capsules descend by parachute over the Kazakh steppe, usually in the area around Dzhezkazgan, and fire small braking retro-rockets just before touchdown, a few centimeters above the ground. Recovery helicopters follow the descent and reach the capsule within minutes.

The space shuttle was the special case: it glided without engines and landed on a runway like an airplane. Its main base was the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, with Edwards Air Force Base, in the California desert, as a backup when weather didn't cooperate. China's Shenzhou spacecraft, for their part, land in Inner Mongolia, in the Dongfeng area.