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Four astronauts have returned to Earth after a nearly eight-month space station stay extended by Boeing’s capsule trouble and Hurricane Milton.
A SpaceX capsule carrying the crew parachuted before dawn on Friday into the Gulf of Mexico, just off the Florida coast, after undocking from the International Space Station earlier this week.
The three Americans and one Russian should have been back two months ago, but their homecoming was stalled by problems with Boeing’s new Starliner astronaut capsule, which came back empty in September because of safety concerns. Hurricane Milton then interfered, followed by a further two weeks of high wind and rough seas.
SpaceX launched the four astronauts – Nasa’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Russia’s Alexander Grebenkin – in March. Barratt, the only space veteran going into the mission, acknowledged the support teams back home that had “to replan, retool and kind of redo everything right along with us … and helped us to roll with all those punches”.
After their standard medical evaluations upon exiting the craft, the astronauts were taken to a medical facility for additional evaluations “out of an abundance of caution”, Nasa said in a statement. Nasa, which is usually tight-lipped on astronaut medical issues, declined to say what prompted its caution or describe the crew’s condition.
At a post-splashdown news briefing, a Nasa official said “the crew is doing great” and made no mention of any issues with the astronauts, but noted two hitches with the Crew Dragon spacecraft’s parachute deployment.
Richard Jones, the deputy manager of Nasa’s commercial crew programme, said Crew Dragon’s initial set of braking parachutes suffered some “debris strikes” and that one of four parachutes in a subsequent set took longer than expected to unfurl.
Neither event affected crew safety, Jones said, calling the splashdown weather “ideal” for the astronauts’ recovery.
The crew’s replacements are the two Starliner test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, whose own mission went from eight days to eight months, and two astronauts launched by SpaceX four weeks ago. Those four will remain in orbit until February.
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The crew’s reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft was on its fifth flight, logging 702 days in orbit since its first mission, SpaceX’s vice-president of flight reliability, William Gerstenmaier, a former senior Nasa official, told reporters during the news conference.
The space station is back to its normal crew size of seven – four Americans and three Russians – after months of overflow.