4 astronauts returned to Earth on Saturday after hustling to the Worldwide Area Station 5 months in the past to alleviate the caught check pilots of Boeing’s Starliner.
Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Pacific off the Southern California coast a day after departing the orbiting lab.
“Welcome house,” SpaceX Mission Management radioed.
Splashing down had been NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov. They launched in March as replacements for the 2 NASA astronauts assigned to Starliner’s botched demo.
Starliner malfunctions stored Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the area station for greater than 9 months as an alternative of per week. NASA ordered Boeing’s new crew capsule to return empty and switched the pair to SpaceX. They left quickly after McClain and her crew arrived to take their locations. Wilmore has since retired from NASA.
Earlier than leaving the area station on Friday, McClain made be aware of “some tumultuous instances on Earth” with individuals struggling.
“We would like this mission, our mission, to be a reminder of what individuals can do after we work collectively, after we discover collectively,” she stated.
McClain seemed ahead to “doing nothing for a few days” as soon as again house in Houston. Excessive on her crewmates’ want listing: sizzling showers and juicy burgers.
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On this picture offered by NASA, SpaceX capsule carrying 4 astronauts, parachutes into the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California coast on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2025. Credit score: Keegan Barber/NASA through AP
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This picture offered by NASA reveals, from left, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 members JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Company) astronaut Takuya Onishi, NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov posing for a portrait contained in the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft that carried them to the Worldwide Area Station and can return them again to Earth. Credit score: NASA through AP
It was SpaceX’s third Pacific splashdown with individuals on board, however the first for a NASA crew in 50 years. Elon Musk’s firm switched capsule returns from Florida to California’s coast earlier this yr to cut back the chance of particles falling on populated areas. Again-to-back non-public crews had been the primary to expertise Pacific homecomings.
The final time NASA astronauts returned to the Pacific from area was through the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, a détente meet-up of People and Soviets in orbit.
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