The touchdown marks a profitable finish to their mission on board the Worldwide House Station to assist stranded pilots.
4 astronauts have returned to Earth after hurrying to the Worldwide House Station (ISS) 5 months in the past to alleviate stranded take a look at pilots of Boeing’s Starliner.
Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Pacific off the Southern California coast on Saturday, a day after departing the orbiting lab.
“Welcome residence,” SpaceX Mission Management radioed.
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 saved Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the house station for greater than 9 months as a substitute of per 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 word of “some tumultuous instances 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 seemed ahead to “doing nothing for a few days” as soon as again residence 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. Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s firm switched capsule returns from Florida to California’s coast earlier this 12 months to scale back the danger of particles falling on populated areas. Again-to-back non-public crews have been the primary to expertise Pacific homecomings.
The final time NASA astronauts returned to the Pacific from house was in the course of the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, a historic detente meet-up of Individuals and Soviets in orbit in the course of the Chilly Battle years.