Cape Canaveral, Fla., Nov. 9 (BUS): Four astronauts returned to Earth on Monday, heading home with SpaceX to finish a 200-day space station mission that began last spring.
Their capsule streaked through the late-night sky like a stunning meteor before they parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida. Rescue boats moved quickly with spotlights.
“On behalf of SpaceX, welcome to Planet Earth,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed from Southern California. Within an hour, all four astronauts were out of the capsule, exchanging fist bumps with the team aboard the rescue ship, according to the Associated Press (AP).
Their return home – just eight hours after leaving the International Space Station – paved the way for SpaceX’s launch of four surrogates early Wednesday night.
The new arrivals were to be launched first, but NASA changed the arrangement due to bad weather and the astronaut’s undeclared medical condition. The duties of welcoming will now fall to the lone American and the two Russians left behind on the space station.
Ahead of Monday afternoon’s class, German astronaut Matthias Maurer, awaiting launch at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, tweeted that it was a shame that the two crews did not overlap on the space station, but that “we trust you will leave everything nice and tidy.” It will be the fourth SpaceX crewed flight for NASA in just a year and a half.
NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan MacArthur, Japan’s Akihiko Hoshed and France’s Thomas Bisquet were supposed to return Monday morning, but high winds in the recovery area delayed their return.
“Another night with this enchanting view. Who can complain? I will miss our spaceship! Pesquet tweeted Sunday along with a short video clip showing the space station lit against the blackness of space and the city lights twinkling on the night side of Earth.
From the space station, NASA astronaut Mark Vandy is – in the middle of a one-year journey – saying goodbye to each of his departing friends, telling Mac Arthur “I’ll miss hearing your laugh in the neighboring units.”
Before leaving the neighborhood, the four circled the space station and took pictures. This was SpaceX’s first; NASA shuttles were doing this all the time before they retired a decade ago. The last flight around the Russian capsule was three years ago.
It wasn’t the most comfortable trip back. The toilet in their capsule was broken, so the astronauts had to rely on diapers for the eight-hour return flight. They shrugged it off late last week as just an extra challenge in their mission.
The first issue arose shortly after takeoff in April; The mission controller warned that a piece of space junk was threatening to collide with its capsule. It turned out to be a false alarm. Then in July, defenses inadvertently fired at a newly arrived Russian plant and sent the plant into a spin. The four astronauts took refuge in a docked SpaceX capsule, preparing to leave in a hurry if necessary.
Among the upbeat accomplishments: four spacewalks to boost the station’s solar power, a filmmaking visit by a Russian camera crew, and Chile’s first-ever space harvest.
The next crew will also spend six months there, welcoming successive groups of tourists. A wealthy Japanese tycoon and his personal assistant will receive transportation from the Russian Space Agency in December, followed by three businessmen arriving via SpaceX in February. SpaceX’s first private chartered flight, in September, bypassed the space station.
NASA’s Cathy Luders, chief space operations officer, said engineers will assess the delayed inflation of one of the four main parachutes, something seen in testing when the lines cluster together. Overall, though, “the back looked clean.”
She added, “I can’t tell you how excited I am to see all four crew members on Earth, and I’m looking forward to releasing another group of four this week.”
RAE