Miami – The four crew members of the eighth commercial space mission of the POT and SpaceX landed this Friday in Pensacola, on the northwest coast of Floridain USAafter spending nearly eight months on the International Space Station (ISS).
The four travelers, NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, left the orbital station last Wednesday.
According to NASA, the travelers spent a total of 232 days aboard the ISS after taking off on March 3 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA reported this Friday that the SpaceX Crew-8 mission successfully landed today at 7:29 GMT and that recovery teams quickly secured the spacecraft after falling into the sea and helped the astronauts during the exit.
The crew will now head to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, while the Dragon spacecraft will return to the SpaceX facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for inspection and reconditioning for future missions.
During their mission, crew members traveled nearly 160 million kilometers and completed 3,760 orbits around Earth.
Astronauts conducted new scientific research to advance human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and benefit human life on Earth.
Among them, with stem cells to develop organoid models to study degenerative diseases, explore how fuel temperature affects the flammability of the material and study how space flights affect the immune function of astronauts.
This mission received the relief on September 29 at the ISS, Crew-9, which on this occasion carried only two travelers, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, to leave free places for the return of the two astronauts from the Boeing Starliner.
Crew-9 will bring back to Earth next February Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams, the two astronauts ‘trapped’ in the orbital station of Boeing’s first manned mission, which failed.
Wilmore and Williams were going to spend just over a week on the ISS, where they arrived last June; But, after technical problems with the device that could not be resolved, NASA decided that they would stay on the ISS until the Dragon returns in February 2025.
These commercial flights began in 2020 and have allowed the United States to send astronauts from American soil again after the cancellation of the space shuttle program in 2011.
Since the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis into Earth orbit in 2011, NASA had been forced to use only Russian launch systems such as the Soyuz to launch its astronauts into orbit.