SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft landed on the Florida coast on March 11 and brought back four people from the International Space Station after more than five months in space. The Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft landed at the main landing site west of Tampa, Florida at 21:02. The landing took place approximately 19 hours after the ship left the station.

The landing marked the end of Crew-5’s 157-day mission, which began with the launch of Falcon 9 on October 5. The mission was led by NASA astronaut Nicole Mann and NASA astronaut Josh Cassada was the pilot. JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina were mission specialists aboard Crew-5.

Endruance left the station eight days after the other Crew Dragon, Endeavour, arrived on Crew-6 mission. NASA astronauts Steven Bowen and Woody Hoburg delivered UAE astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andriy Fedyaev to the station. They will stay on the station for about six months when they are displaced by the Crew-7 mission, which will also use the Endurance spacecraft.

SpaceX will fly two commercial Crew Dragon missions before Crew-7. The Ax-2 mission for Axiom Space is tentatively scheduled for May and will travel to the ISS for about 10 days. It will feature former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson as commander and client John Shoffner as pilot, along with Saudi astronauts Rayyana Barnawi and Ali Alkarni.

Polaris Dawn, a Crew Dragon mission that is part of billionaire Jared Isaac’s special Polaris astronaut mission program, is expected in the summer, Isaacman said on Feb. Isaacman will command the mission with Scott “Kidd” Poteet and SpaceX as the pilot. Staff Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon as mission specialists. The five-day mission will not dock with the ISS, but instead perform other missions, including the first spacewalk with Crew Dragon.

The closest missions

Now NASA and SpaceX will turn their attention to the next Dragon SpX-27 cargo mission. This mission, carrying more than 2,700 kilograms of cargo, is scheduled to depart from Kennedy Space Center at 8:30 PM EDT on March 14. The crew’s next mission to the station is the first test flight of a Boeing CST-100 Starliner with two NASA astronauts on board. Steve Stich, head of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a post-landing briefing that the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission is not scheduled until the end of April.

“We really need to come back here in March and see where we are now and then figure out what the next steps are.” The unmanned Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft is scheduled to leave the station on March 28. This spacecraft, which delivered two Russian cosmonauts and an American astronaut to the station in September, suffered radiator damage and lost coolant in December. In February, Roscosmos launched a new unmanned Soyuz spacecraft, the Soyuz MS-23, to replace the Soyuz MS-22.

NASA ISS program manager Joel Montalbano said at a briefing that until the damaged radiator returns to Earth, controllers will collect temperature and humidity data inside the capsule as it returns to Earth. He said Russian engineers are investigating the possibility that he and the Progress cargo spacecraft, which suffered a similar loss of coolant in February, were a manufacturing defect. “Did anything change in the production of these cars?” he said, describing such a review as “we would have done exactly our part”.

He added that, according to the station’s current statements, NASA still believes the Soyuz MS-23 will be able to get the crew back home safely from the station in September. “We’re sure of that. Trust is good, but we’re always looking.”