ORLANDO, Fla. — After weather delayed departure for two days, four astronauts climbed on board the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom on Friday to take a five-hour ride back down to Earth and conclude their nearly six-month mission to the International Space Station.
The spacecraft hit the water off the coast of Jacksonville in the Atlantic Ocean at 4:55 p.m. to bring NASA’s Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins as well as the ESA’s Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy back home after spending nearly 170 days on the orbiting station. The quartet launched from Kennedy Space Center on April 27 on a SpaceX Falcon 9.
“SpaceX from Freedom, thank you for an incredible ride up to orbit and an incredible ride home. Glad to be back,” said Crew-4 commander Lindgren.
The capsule had performed its deorbit burn slowing from more than 17,000 mph during which it will reached temperatures topping 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit producing 3-5 G’s of force, according to SpaceX commentators during coverage of the return trip home. Once in the atmosphere, its drogue parachutes slowed it further from 350 mph at about 18,000 feet altitude before the final four parachutes deployed at 119 mph at about 6,500 feet, to then slow it to 16 mph before splashdown.
The capsule was met by first responding fast boats with safety personnel to ensure no hazards were present, and was then lifted on board the SpaceX recovery ship named Megan. Less than an hour after hitting the surface, the side hatch was opened so the crew could exit the capsule. The NASA astronauts will be flown to Houston while Cristoforetti will head to Europe as the capsule makes its way to Port Canaveral for a return to KSC to be refurbished for a future flight.
The quartet took their seats Friday morning with hatch closure after 10 a.m., and undocking at 12:05 p.m.
“We’re sad to see you go,” said Crew-5 member Josh Cassada now part of the remaining Expedition 68 personnel on board the station as the Dragon drifted away. “We wish you godspeed, a safe re-entry landing and calm seas. We’re going to miss you guys. We thank you for your mentorship. Enjoy your time with your families.”
“Good work station,” replied Lindgren. “It was an absolute pleasure and privilege to serve on the space station these past six months and enjoy working with you all the past couple of weeks. We know you’re going to continue to do amazing things on station. We look forward to seeing you back home as well.”
Its departure was pushed from Wednesday as a cold front pushed across Florida and NASA and SpaceX teams begged off recovery plans despite having several preplanned landing sites in either the Gulf of Mexico or Atlantic.
The crew orbited the Earth during their stay 2,720 times traveling more than 72 million miles.
Crew Dragon Freedom completed its first return to Earth as the newest of four Crew Dragons that have been flying astronauts to the space station since 2020. It left behind sister ship Crew Dragon Endurance that arrived with the four members of Crew-5 to the station last week.
“We have a kind of a full house now,” said Lindgren during a departure ceremony on Wednesday. “So we’re looking forward to leaving the space station in the very capable hands of our colleagues. It’s great to welcome them up here, and we know that they’re going to have an extraordinary experience as well, but we look forward to handing over.”
The departure brought the station’s population back down from 11 to seven including Crew-5′s NASA astronauts Cassada and Nicole Mann, Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata. Another NASA astronaut Frank Rubio flew up earlier in September aboard a Soyuz with cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin.
The Crew-4 astronauts were part of Expeditions 67 and 68 with Cristoforetti taking over command of the ISS for just a short time before her departure.
“It’s a very peculiar time here on space station these days,” Cristoforetti said, “We have a fast and furious rotation of crews, so we just had a change of command ceremony a couple of weeks ago and now we get to do it again.”
She handed the symbolic space station keys to Prokopyev during the ceremony along with something extra she said has become “a bit of a tradition.”
“This is for when a real emergency happens,” she said handing Prokopyev a white squeeze bottle. “You’ve got the cake in the tube to help anyone out who is really having a bad day.”
Leaving behind tubes of food in favor of cuisine not limited by a lack of gravity is something all four members of Crew-4 said they’re looking forward to.
“For me, certainly some ice cream, some pizza,” said Hines, but mostly he’s looking forward to seeing family and friends. “Our families make such big sacrifices for us to be able to come up here and do this amazing thing to benefit humanity. But getting back and seeing them, getting those first few hugs when we get back is really going to be awesome, really looking forward to that.”
The SpaceX fleet of Crew Dragons is made up of Freedom having completed its debut flight; Endurance now on its second flight; Endeavour, which made the first crewed flight on Demo-2 in 2020 and has flown three times; and Resilience, which has flown twice. SpaceX recently announced the Dragon capsules have been certified for up to five flights.
The next planned flight will be the Crew-6 mission targeting February 2023. That would come on either Endeavour or Freedom.
Resilience is slated to fly next on the commercial orbital flight Polaris Dawn with billionaire Jared Isaacman now targeting March 2023. Isaacman last flew Resilience in September 2021 for SpaceX’s first commercial flight Inspiration4. SpaceX installed a special cupola for that flight on the spacecraft in lieu of a docking port since it wasn’t headed to the ISS. For the upcoming flight, SpaceX plans on opening up the spacecraft to allow some of its passengers to perform a tethered spacewalk.
Also targeting the second quarter of 2023 is the next commercial Axiom Space flight to bring four more private passengers to the ISS.
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