Four-person crew returns to Earth aboard SpaceX’s Dragon capsule

A SpaceX Dragon capsule with a crew of four returning from the International Space Station streaked through the atmosphere over Florida and splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean early Monday, closing out the company's initial commercial crew contract with NASA.

But SpaceX has at least eight more space station crew rotation missions under contract with the US space agency, plus additional flights for private customers using the Crew Dragon spacecraft. The first of the crew rotation missions covered in the NASA contract extension launched on August 26, and the spacecraft is currently docked at the ISS.

The mission that launched last month, designated Crew-7, is SpaceX's seventh operational crew rotation flight to the space station. The four-person crew that arrived at the station on Crew-7 will live and work aboard the orbiting outpost until February, replacing the Crew-6 mission that returned to Earth early Monday.

Closing out 186 days in orbit

The return of Crew-6 was delayed several days as Hurricane Idalia churned near SpaceX's splashdown zones near Florida. However, the weather cleared, and the seas calmed sufficiently for NASA and SpaceX officials to give the green light for SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft to depart the space station Sunday morning.

After backing away from the space station, the Dragon spacecraft and its four-person crew set up for re-entry back into the atmosphere Sunday night. The 13-foot-wide (4-meter) capsule fired its braking rockets and closed its nose cone before dropping through the atmosphere, putting on a spectacular midnight sky show over Florida as it streaked through the sky with a trail of plasma in its wake.

Four main parachutes unfurled to slow the ship for splashdown northeast of Jacksonville at 12:17 am EDT (04:17 UTC) Monday, where a SpaceX recovery vessel pulled the spacecraft from the sea and helped its four crew members out of their seats.

The Dragon capsule splashed down in 5-foot seas, higher waves than any previous SpaceX crew return, but still within safety limits, according to Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager.

"You could see the swells, and the crew did really well in those sea states," Stich said. "And the winds were about 5 knots at landing, so it was a very nice benign landing for the crew."

NASA commander Steve Bowen, pilot Woody Hoburg, and mission specialists Sultan Alneyadi from the United Arab Emirates and Andrey Fedyaev from Russia appeared in good shape after 186 days in orbit since their launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center back in March. The crew members were expected to undergo medical checks and fly back to their training base in Houston on a NASA jet.

"It was a nominal return," said Benji Reed, SpaceX's director of human spaceflight programs. "Dragon is healthy, the parachutes performed as expected, and our recovery teams did great. Dragon did great, and the crew appeared to do awesome."

During their six-month expedition, Bowen and his crewmates worked on numerous scientific experiments and performed three spacewalks to support the installation of new roll-out solar arrays outside the space station. Combining his experience on this mission and three previous space shuttle flights, Bowen now ranks third all-time for total time spent spacewalking, at 65 hours and 57 minutes.

Hoburg shared his experiences on the space station on social media, producing insightful videos showing daily life on the International Space Station. His videos captured the experience of an orbital reboost, training with the station's robotic arm, and exercising in microgravity, among other topics.

"I just wanted to kind of do something that I hoped was authentic and in the moment without too much preparation, just showing some of the amazing work that we get to do up here," Hoburg said last month. "So any time that I had a few extra minutes and thought I was doing something a little bit interesting, I figured I'd pull out a camera and hopefully share it with people so they could see."

Alneyadi became the first astronaut from the Arab world to fly a long-duration mission in space, marking a leap forward for the UAE's fast-growing space program. Fedyaev was the second Russian cosmonaut SpaceX has ferried to and from the space station as part of an agreement between NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

After Monday's splashdown, SpaceX's recovery team will bring the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft back to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for refurbishment ahead of its fifth flight to the space station on the next NASA crew mission in February. Meanwhile, another crew rotation is on tap at the International Space Station later this month with the launch of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on September 15 carrying two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut to the orbiting laboratory, replacing a three-person crew wrapping up more than a year in orbit.

SpaceX is going, not Boeing

In 2014, NASA awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to develop and fly new commercial crew capsules to transport astronauts between Earth and the ISS. Those contracts covered similar scopes of work, with test flights of each company's space capsules followed by six operational crew rotation missions to the ISS.

With the return of the Crew-6 mission, SpaceX's work under the original commercial crew contract is complete. Meanwhile, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft still hasn't gotten off the ground with astronauts.

Boeing's delays prompted NASA to award contract extensions to SpaceX covering eight additional Crew Dragon flights to the space station, each lasting up to seven months, at an average cost of $277 million per mission. SpaceX's entire commercial crew contract since 2014 is now valued at more than $4.9 billion, according to NASA.

NASA's commercial crew agreements with Boeing are valued at more than $5.1 billion, and the company is still at least six months away from launching two NASA astronauts on a short-duration test flight to the ISS. There's still a chance the first of Boeing's six operational Starliner flights could launch in late 2024, but it's more likely that won't happen until 2025.

Reed, who leads SpaceX's human spaceflight programs, said the return of the Crew-6 mission Monday had an "extra special meaning" for him.

"We started this program to help NASA get their astronauts to the station and bring them home a number of years ago, and this marks the final mission that was originally envisioned in the original contract, and what an honor to be able to be part of this entire cycle so far," he said.

So SpaceX is now on the hook for at least 14 NASA crew rotation missions, plus the first Crew Dragon demonstration mission with astronauts that SpaceX flew in 2020. SpaceX has also launched three fully commercial Crew Dragon flights—one standalone all-private mission called Inspiration4 and two short commercial trips to the ISS for Axiom Space—bringing the total number of human spaceflight missions SpaceX has launched to 11.

Not counting Crew-7, which is already in orbit, SpaceX has 12 more Crew Dragon missions on contract—seven for NASA, two for Axiom, two for the Polaris Program led by billionaire Jared Isaacman, and one on the books to fly a crew to an outpost being developed by the private space station company Vast.

There are surely more human spaceflight contracts to come SpaceX's way as other companies plan to build their own space stations in low-Earth orbit. NASA could also buy more Crew Dragon missions.

SpaceX currently has four reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft in its fleet—Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance, and Freedom—and plans to add one more to the rotation next year. NASA has certified each spacecraft for five long-duration missions to the space station. Endeavour, which returned to Earth on Monday, will reach that threshold with its next flight.

Reed said SpaceX wants to fly each capsule up to 15 times. "All of the data so far continue to indicate that that's possible," he said. "Critically, we're working with our NASA partners to ensure that this makes sense with them as well, and that we can certify the vehicle to do that."

SpaceX typically removes the Crew Dragon spacecraft's heat shield after each flight and refurbishes the shield's composite structure, adding new ablative thermal protection tiles for each mission. Propellants are drained and refilled between missions, too.

Stich, who oversees NASA's commercial crew contracts with SpaceX and Boeing, said ground teams will closely inspect the propulsion system on the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft after its return to Earth. Engineers want to see if there are any signs of corrosion in the propulsion valves after an isolation valve stuck on a recent Dragon cargo mission to the space station.

"We'll want to take a look at those," Stich said. "Of course, that problem was discovered after this vehicle was already in space. So we'll take a little bit of time to look at that system and get it turned around, and the target is the Crew-8 flight no earlier than February."

Reed said he expects "a certain amount of additional refurbishment" will be required to extend the certification for each Crew Dragon spacecraft beyond five missions. "But I'm very optimistic about getting up to 15."