Four astronauts returned to Earth this Friday after a stay of almost eight months on the space station, prolonged by problems with the Boeing capsule and Hurricane Milton.
A SpaceX capsule carrying the crew parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coast of Florida, after undocking from the International Space Station midweek.
The three Americans and one Russian should have returned two months ago. But their return home was delayed by problems with Boeing’s new Starliner astronaut capsule, which returned empty in September due to safety concerns. Then Hurricane Milton interfered, followed by another two weeks of strong winds and rough seas.
SpaceX launched the four — NASA’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Russia’s Alexander Grebenkin — in March. Barratt, the only space veteran participating in the mission, credited the support teams at home who had to “replan, reequip and redo everything together with us… and helped us weather all those hits.”
Their replacements are the two Starliner test pilots, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose mission went from eight days to eight months, and two astronauts launched by SpaceX four weeks ago. Those four will remain there until February.
The space station is back to its normal crew size of seven people (four Americans and three Russians) after months of overstaffing.
The spacecraft separated from the ISS this Wednesday after 5:05 p.m. Eastern Time in the United States (9:05 p.m. GMT) and is scheduled to land next Friday at 3:29 p.m. (7:29 a.m. GMT) in one of the multiple available areas. off the coast of Florida.
The four travelers were aboard the space station since last March.
After two weeks of delays due to adverse weather conditions, the Dragon capsule lifted off from the ISS, while both spacecraft flew 418 kilometers (260 miles) over the Pacific Ocean.
This mission was replaced on September 29 by Crew-9, which on this occasion carried only two travelers, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut from the Russian Roscosmos agency Aleksandr Gorbunov, to leave free places for the return of the two astronauts from the Boeing Starliner.
Crew-9 will bring back to Earth next February Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams, the two astronauts ‘trapped’ in the orbital station of Boeing’s first manned mission, which failed.
Wilmore and Williams were going to spend just over a week on the ISS, where they arrived last June; But, after technical problems with the device that could not be resolved, NASA decided that they would stay on the ISS until the Dragon returns in February 2025.
These commercial flights began in 2020 and have allowed the United States to send astronauts from American soil again after the cancellation of the space shuttle program in 2011.
Since the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis into Earth orbit in 2011, NASA had been forced to use only Russian launch systems such as the Soyuz to launch its astronauts into orbit.
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