WASHINGTON
The NASA Crew-3 mission returned home to Earth on May 6 after six months aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
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The SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft with NASA astronauts Kayla Barron, Raja Chari and Tom Marshburn, as well as European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer, disembarked from the orbital laboratory a day earlier.
Their 23.5-hour trip back saw them splashing off the coast of Florida at 12:43 p.m.
“On behalf of the entire SpaceX team, welcome home,” a SpaceX crew member said moments after the capsule fell.
They left behind one Italian and three American astronauts from Crew-4 and three Russian astronauts. Before leaving, Marshburn handed over command of the station to Russian Oleg Artemiev.
During its mission, Crew-3 conducted hundreds of scientific experiments, including growing hot peppers in space to supplement its knowledge of growing crops on long-term missions, studying how concrete hardens in space, and observing the Earth.
“Every day on @Space_Station is #EarthDay for @NASA_Astronauts, as we see how thin is the precious layer that protects everything we know and love as a human race,” wrote on Twitter Chari, commander of Crew-3.
“We hope that @NASA research will help purify H20 and reduce carbon dioxide, but the rest is up to us.”
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Chancellor Olaf Scholz wished Maurer, the 12th German in space, a “good and safe journey back with a soft landing” and thanked him on Twitter on May 5 for “all the new discoveries in space that are so important to us here on The Earth. “The Crew-3 expedition came at an increasingly busy time for retail space.
They welcomed a private crew on board, which included three wealthy businessmen who came and went on another SpaceX Crew Dragon, as well as a Japanese mission flying a Soyuz plane to the Russian segment.
The ISS is now awaiting docking with a Boeing Starliner capsule without a crew, which is scheduled to launch from Florida on May 19.
NASA is seeking to certify a second company to transport astronauts to a space region called Low Earth Orbit, leaving it to develop its super-heavy space launch system (SLS) for missions to the moon and possibly to Mars.
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