Astronauts Return To Earth After 5 Months At The International Space Station

Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Pacific off the Southern California coast a day after departing the orbiting lab.

Splashing down have been NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov. They launched in March as replacements for the 2 NASA astronauts assigned to Starliner’s botched demo.

Starliner malfunctions stored Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the house station for greater than 9 months as an alternative of every week. NASA ordered Boeing’s new crew capsule to return empty and switched the pair to SpaceX. They left quickly after McClain and her crew arrived to take their locations. Wilmore has since retired from NASA.

Earlier than leaving the house station on Friday, McClain made notice of “some tumultuous occasions on Earth” with folks struggling.

“We would like this mission, our mission, to be a reminder of what folks can do after we work collectively, after we discover collectively,” she mentioned.

McClain regarded ahead to “doing nothing for a few days” as soon as again house in Houston. Excessive on her crewmates’ want checklist: scorching showers and juicy burgers.

It was SpaceX’s third Pacific splashdown with folks on board, however the first for a NASA crew in 50 years. Elon Musk’s firm switched capsule returns from Florida to California’s coast earlier this 12 months to cut back the chance of particles falling on populated areas. Again-to-back personal crews have been the primary to expertise Pacific homecomings.

The final time NASA astronauts returned to the Pacific from house was throughout the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, a détente meet-up of People and Soviets in orbit.

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