A group of four astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after a five-month mission to the International Space Station, where they had replaced the stranded Boeing Starliner’s test pilots.
Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Pacific off the Southern California coast a day after departing the orbiting lab.
“Welcome home,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed.
Making the splashdown were NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, alongside Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov. They had launched in March to substitute for the two NASA astronauts originally scheduled for the Starliner’s unsuccessful test flight.
Due to Starliner’s issues, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stayed at the space station for over nine months instead of the planned week. NASA decided to send Boeing’s new crew capsule back without any crew and reassigned the pair to SpaceX. Wilmore and Williams departed shortly after McClain and her team arrived. Wilmore has since retired from NASA.
Before leaving the space station on Friday, McClain made note of “some tumultuous times on Earth” with people struggling.
“We want this mission, our mission, to be a reminder of what people can do when we work together, when we explore together,” she said.
McClain was eager to enjoy “doing nothing for a couple of days” upon her return to Houston. Her crewmates were also excited about having hot showers and savoring some juicy burgers.
This marks SpaceX’s third human Pacific splashdown and the first Pacific return for a NASA crew in 50 years. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s company relocated capsule returns from Florida to California to minimize the chance of debris falling in inhabited regions. Prior private crews were the first to land in the Pacific.
The last return of NASA astronauts to the Pacific was in 1975 during the Apollo-Soyuz mission, a historic in-orbit meeting between American and Soviet astronauts.
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