SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts are back on Earth.
The four astronauts of the SpaceX Dragon capsule, named Endurance, collapsed late Saturday March 11, concluding a five-month mission to the International Space Station. Back on the capsule are NASA astronauts Josh Cassada and Nicole Mann, Japanese Koichi Wakata and Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina, who plunged into darkness after flying over the Gulf of Mexico off Tampa Bay, Florida , at 9:02 p.m. EST (0202 GMT on March 12).
“Thanks SpaceX, that was a hell of a ride!” Mann radioed the SpaceX mission control team after the splashdown. “We are happy to be home.”
Related: Northern Lights and more: Crew 5 astronauts reflect on their time in orbit
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The four astronauts spent 157 days in space during their mission to the space station on a mission that marked the first space flight for Mann, Cassada and Kikina. It was the fifth flight for Wakata, which now has 505 days in space under its belt. SpaceX recovery teams quickly arrived on the scene in speedboats from the company’s recovery ship SS Shannon (named after astronaut Shannon Walker who flew on SpaceX’s Crew-1 flight for NASA).
Endurance undocked from the station earlier on Saturday at 02:20 EST (0720 GMT), then performed a series of maneuvers to get on course for atmospheric re-entry. Splashing safely under parachutes concluded SpaceX’s fifth operational mission for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, swapping personnel aboard the space station with recently arrived members of Crew-6.
NASA officials said the Crew-5 Dragon lit up the night sky as a brilliant streak of light as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.
The Crew-5 mission achieved two historic firsts, with Mann becoming the first Native American woman to reach space and Kikina the first Russian to fly on a private US spacecraft. Additionally, the mission marked Wakata’s fifth return from space – a Japanese record – with Crew Dragon the third crewed craft he has flown.
It would have been possible, by the way, for a fifth passenger to also go home on Endurance. In mid-December 2022, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft docked at the station leaked and lost all coolant, apparently after suffering a meteoroid strike. This Soyuz was to be the homecoming of three astronauts, including NASA’s Frank Rubio.
In January, Endurance was temporarily equipped to carry an additional person – Rubio – in case an emergency evacuation from the ISS was needed. (The other two Soyuz crew members, cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, reportedly carried the injured Soyuz home; Russian space officials had determined that the spacecraft could safely carry two people, but not three, without coolant.)
The Endurance modifications were scrapped last month, however, after Russia’s Roscosmos space agency launched a replacement Soyuz to serve as a throwback to Rubio, Prokopyev and Petelin.
SpaceX’s Crew-6 arrived at the orbital lab on March 3 for a six-month stay, delivering NASA astronauts Warren “Woody” Hoburg and Stephen Bowen, cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev and astronaut from the United Arab Emirates (UAE ) Sultan Al-Neyadi on the Dragon Effort capsule.
Crew-6 is also a historic mission: Al-Neyadi is the first UAE astronaut to perform a long-duration space mission.
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