SpaceX completed its fourth commercial crewed mission to the International Space Station on Oct. 14, returning the Crew Dragon spacecraft safely with four American and European astronauts aboard. The Crew Dragon spacecraft “Liberty” touched down in the Atlantic Ocean east of Jacksonville, Florida, at 4:55 p.m. ET, less than five hours after detaching from the International Space Station, setting a record for the fastest return of a Crew Dragon to the ground. .
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On board were NASA astronauts Bob Hines, Kjell Lindgren and Jessica Watkins and European Space Agency astronaut Saman Samantha Cristoforetti.
Crew Dragon’s return to Earth was smooth, with all four astronauts in good condition, Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said on a call with reporters. “The whole team did a great job”.
NASA originally planned for Crew Dragon to leave the space station on Oct. 12 for the Oct. 13 splashdown, but the departure was delayed due to weather at the splashdown site along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Conditions subsequently improved after another delay on the 13th, allowing Crew Dragon to evacuate at 12:05 pm. East on October 14, briefly returning to Earth.
This splashdown marks the end of the Crew-4 program. The mission began with the predawn launch of Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center on April 27 and docked with the space station less than 16 hours later. Four astronauts spent 170 days in space.
Nearly eight days after the arrival of Endurance, another Crew Dragon spacecraft on the Crew-5 mission, Crew-4 astronauts departed the space station to transport American, Japanese and Russian crews to the space station. Among them is Anna Kikina, the first Russian cosmonaut to fly on a commercial manned spacecraft and the first to fly on an American spacecraft in two decades.