The four astronauts that make up the Crew-5 crew aboard the International Space Station returned home this Saturday after a five-month stay in space and splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule disembarked from the space station at 2:20 a.m. ET; the final leg of the astronauts journey. The spacecraft then maneuvered back to Earth before plunging back into the atmosphere to splash down off the coast of Tampa, Florida just after 9 p.m. ET on Saturday.
Rescue ships awaited the team’s arrival, ready to lift the capsule out of the ocean and allow the crew to disembark, giving the astronauts their first breath of fresh air in nearly 160 days.
The four crew members, NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, astronaut Koichi Wakata of JAXA, or the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and cosmonaut Anna Kikina of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, launched into the space station aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule last October. They have spent the last few months conducting research experiments and keeping up with the maintenance of the two-decade-old orbiting laboratory.
