Four astronauts returned to Earth on Friday after a stay of almost eight months on the International Space Station, prolonged by the problems with the Boeing capsule and the effects of Hurricane Milton.
Before dawn, the SpaceX capsule in which they traveled parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Florida, after leaving the ISS in the middle of the week.
The four astronauts should have returned two months ago. But its return was delayed by problems with Boeing’s new Starliner crew capsule, which made the trip empty in September for safety reasons. Then Hurricane Milton thwarted their plans, followed by two weeks of rough seas and strong winds.
SpaceX had flown the four crew members — NASA’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin — to the orbital outpost in March. Barratt, the only one on the mission with previous experience in space, thanked the ground support teams, who had to “rethink, reequip and redo everything together with us (…) and helped us get through all those blows.”
Their replacements are the two Starliner test pilots, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose mission went from eight days to eight months, and the two astronauts who flew with SpaceX four weeks ago. The four will be on the ISS until February.
The Space Station crew thus returns to its usual size of seven people — four Americans and three Russians — after months of overcrowding.
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