Crew-12 Astronauts Return To Earth Aboard SpaceX Dragon After 8 months On ISS

SpaceX Crew-12 mission astronauts aboard Crew Dragon Freedom returned to Earth on Thursday (Oct. 8), after undocking from the International Space Station at 1205 UTC Wednesday (Oct. 7). The capsule executed a deorbit burn before entering the atmosphere at about 1522 UTC, achieving a successful splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Los Angeles at 1534 UTC after a roughly 27-hour trip.

Following splashdown, the capsule was secured by recovery teams aboard the Shannon ship, and the astronauts -- Jessica Meir (NASA Commander), Jack Hathaway (NASA Pilot), Sophie Adenot (ESA Mission Specialist), and Andrey Fedyaev (Roscosmos Mission Specialist) -- were lifted aboard for initial medical evaluations before being transported by helicopter to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for rehabilitation. Crew members.

Meir and Fedyaev were experienced space travelers, while Hathaway and Adenot were on their first spaceflights.

"The crew is doing well. They were all smiles exiting the capsule," Bill Spetch, deputy manager of commercial, NASA’s Low Earth Orbit Program, said during a post-splashdown press conference Thursday. "It's great to have them back after 237 days in space, 235 of those on the space station."

During the mission, which lasted 237 days (nearly eight months), the four astronauts conducted extensive scientific research, including tests on stem cell production, IV fluid generation, and the effects of microgravity on bone density and blood flow.

The Crew-12 astronauts felt a mix of emotions about their homecoming, as big transitions are always bittersweet. Indeed, Meir gave us a sense of this a few weeks back.

"What I'm looking forward to most is seeing my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter,” Meir said during a Sept. 16 call with reporters from the station.

"I'm so looking forward to seeing nature again," she added, "feeling the breeze on my face, the wind rustling through the leaves, experiencing all those things that we don't have up here. But I will very, very much miss being weightless all the time and the incredible views that we have."

The Crew-12 astronauts launched to the ISS aboard Dragon Grace atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 13. Their arrival brought the station up to its normal complement of seven crewmembers. It had been operating with a skeleton crew of three since Jan. 15, when SpaceX's Crew-11 mission headed home a month early to deal with a medical issue experienced by one of its astronauts, NASA's Mike Fincke.

That was the first medical evacuation in the long history of the ISS. But it was not an emergency situation, NASA officials stressed at the time, and Fincke is doing fine now here on terra firma. (He retired in August with a total of 549 days in space, the fourth-most ever for a NASA astronaut). Crew-12, in turn, was relieved by the four astronauts of the Crew-13 mission, which arrived at the ISS last Thursday (Oct. 1).