SpaceX crew returns to Earth after nearly 8 months at space station

SpaceX’s Crew-8 successfully returned to Earth on Friday after staying at the International Space Station (ISS) for nearly eight months.

A capsule carrying the crew parachuted before dawn into the Gulf of Mexico just off the Florida coast after undocking from the ISS mid-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.

Then Hurricane Milton interfered, followed by another two weeks of high wind and rough seas.

The four-member crew including NASA’s Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Russia’s Alexander Grebenkin launched the mission to space in March on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

They spent a total of 232 days on the space station, completed more than 3,700 orbits around Earth, and conducted scientific research at the space station.

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”.

Their 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 up there until February.

The space station is now back to its normal crew size of seven with four Americans and three Russians after months of overflow.