WASHINGTON, May 2 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Four astronauts left the International Space Station on Saturday aboard a SpaceX vessel, after more than 160 days in space which will culminate in a splash landing off the Florida coast.
The Crew Dragon capsule undocked from the ISS as scheduled at 8:35 pm (0035 Sunday GMT). With the flight back to Earth expected to take six-and-a-half hours, the crew was scheduled to splash down in the dark off Panama City, Florida, in the Gulf of Mexico at 2:57 am (0657 GMT).
Seven astronauts remained on the ISS including a new crew of four who arrived on a different SpaceX craft last week.
SpaceX boats are expected to reach the capsule about 10 minutes after splashdown.
Astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi went to space last November as the crew on the first fully operational mission to the ISS aboard a vehicle made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which has become NASA’s favored commercial transportation partner.
Prior to that, two American astronauts made a test mission to the ISS in May and stayed for two months.
That was the first launch to the ISS from US soil since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. It was also the first crewed mission run by a private company, as opposed to NASA.
Until then US astronauts had caught rides to the ISS aboard Russian spacecraft.
The four astronauts who left Saturday — their mission was called Crew-1 — will splash down in the same capsule in which they traveled into space in November. With them are freezers with samples from zero-gravity scientific experiments they conducted aboard the ISS.
On Tuesday, departing astronaut Walker handed over command of the ISS to a member of the newly arrived crew, Akihiko Hoshide of Japan.
In the end the departing astronauts spent 168 days aboard the ISS.
The departure was initially scheduled for Wednesday but postponed twice due to forecasts of bad weather at the splash down site.
Besides the new crew of four, the ISS is still home to another American and two Russians. — NNN-AGENCIES