NASA’s Crew-8 mission members returned to Earth Friday — capping a nearly eight-month mission after their trip from the International Space Station was extended several times.
The SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the four-member crew splashed down off the coast of Pensacola, Fla. just before 3:30 a.m. ET after a fiery nighttime return across southern Mexico.
Over about an hour, the capsule pierced the atmosphere with an orbital velocity of 17,500 mph and eventually eased to a leisurely 16 mph under a canopy of parachutes as it landed in the Gulf of Mexico. The capsule undocked from the I.S.S. Wednesday afternoon.
The Crew-8 members spent 235 days in space, the longest of any human SpaceX mission. Their spacecraft — Endeavour — set a duration record for a human-rated capsule: 701 days in orbit.
The crew included three NASA astronauts: commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps. Cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin of Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, was also part of this mission.
They lifted off into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Mar. 3, 2024 and spent more than seven months at the space station conducting scientific research, including on the shift of body fluids during spaceflight and how UV radiation and weightlessness affect plant growth.
During their time on the I.S.S., Crew-8 members also became part of a record number of people orbiting Earth. When the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft brought a NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts to the station in September, there were a total of 19 people in orbit, including the astronauts on China's Tiangong space station.
The Crew-8 mission was supposed to end in August but was extended several times following problems during the test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
Starliner, which carried two NASA astronauts, experienced thruster problems as it approached the ISS in June. NASA determined it was too risky for the crew to return to Earth on board Starliner and flew the spacecraft back to Earth empty in September.
The two Crew-9 mission members, who arrived at the I.S.S. in September, will bring back the NASA astronauts left by Starliner, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, at the completion of their mission which is set to end in Feb. 2025.
The return of Crew-8 was also delayed due to Hurricane Milton and unfavorable weather conditions at the splashdown sites off Florida over the past week.
NPR’s Russell Lewis and Central Florida Public Media’s Brendan Byrne contributed to this report.
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