Astronauts return to Earth in SpaceX splashdown after 5-month ISS mission

The landing marks a palmy extremity to their ngo connected committee the International Space Station to assistance stranded pilots.

Four astronauts person returned to Earth aft hurrying to the International Space Station (ISS) 5 months agone to relieve stranded trial pilots of Boeing’s Starliner.

Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Pacific disconnected the Southern California seashore connected Saturday, a time aft departing the orbiting lab.

“Welcome home,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed.

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

Starliner malfunctions kept Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams astatine the abstraction presumption for much than 9 months alternatively of a week.

NASA ordered Boeing’s caller unit capsule to instrumentality bare and switched the brace to SpaceX. They near soon aft McClain and her unit arrived to instrumentality their places. Wilmore has since retired from NASA.

Before leaving the abstraction presumption connected Friday, McClain made enactment of “some tumultuous times connected Earth”, with radical struggling.

“We privation this mission, our mission, to beryllium a reminder of what radical tin bash erstwhile we enactment together, erstwhile we research together,” she said.

McClain looked guardant to “doing thing for a mates of days” erstwhile backmost location successful Houston. High connected her crewmates’ privation list: Hot showers and juicy burgers.

It was SpaceX’s 3rd Pacific splashdown with radical connected board, but the archetypal for a NASA unit successful 50 years. Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s institution switched capsule returns from Florida to California’s seashore earlier this twelvemonth to trim the hazard of debris falling connected populated areas. Back-to-back backstage crews were the archetypal to acquisition Pacific homecomings.

The past clip NASA astronauts returned to the Pacific from abstraction was during the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, a historical detente meet-up of Americans and Soviets successful orbit during the Cold War years.