Four astronauts returned to Earth and each made their first long-duration space flight aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
Steven Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg of NASA, Sultan Al-Neyadi of the UAE (United Arab Emirates), and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Company, collectively known as SpaceX Crew-6, landed on the Dragon spacecraft “Endeavor” . company. Monday, September 4 at 12:17 a.m. EDT (0417 GMT) in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. Of the four, only Bowen had flown into space before.
“It was a new experience for all of us when we came here six months ago,” Bowen said at the brief farewell ceremony at the station on Thursday, August 31. “I’ve been to space but never been on a long-term mission. It was an absolutely incredible experience and a great opportunity to watch my amazing teammates come.”
After launch on March 2, Crew 6’s astronauts completed their 186-day mission to the International Space Station, where they served as flight engineers for Expedition 68 and Expedition 69.
They were originally scheduled to return home on Sunday morning, September 3, but bad weather extended their orbital stay by one day.
“Spending six incredibly short months living and working at this incredible orbital outpost is definitely the experience of a lifetime and a true honour,” Warren said at the same ceremony. “I think we’ve done a lot. We started right away with SpaceX. [Commercial Resupply Services або CRS] The 27 is a cargo truck full of science. Then we had a SpaceX mission [CRS] 28, we also hosted the visiting Axiom crew on board.”
“We did three spacewalks with our crew, Crew-6. We put [вантажний] Cygnus’ tool. We’ve done a lot of maintenance and hopefully we’ll leave the space station in slightly better condition than we found it,” said Warren.
With Crew-6 returning to Earth, Space Station Expedition 69, NASA astronauts Frank Rubio and Jasmine Mogbeli, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev continues with Dmytro Petelin and Kostyantyn Borisov. Expedition 70 will begin as the Russian Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft leaves the station in late September with Prokopiev, Petelin and Rubio; Rubio sets a new US record for a single space mission duration of 371 days. Source
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