Three astronauts and one cosmonaut returned to Earth in a SpaceX Dragon capsule after spending roughly six months aboard the International Space Station.
Crew Dragon Endeavour splashed down within the Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, at 12:17 a.m. EDT (04:17 UTC) Sept. 4. Aboard the Crew-6 mission were NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, United Arab Emirates astronaut Sultan Alneyadi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
“After spending six months aboard the International Space Station, logging nearly 79 million miles during their mission, and completing a whole bunch of scientific experiments for the advantage of all humanity, NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 has returned home to planet Earth,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in an agency statement. “This international crew represented three nations, but together they demonstrated humanity’s shared ambition to succeed in latest cosmic shores. The contributions of Crew-6 will help prepare NASA to return to the Moon under Artemis, proceed onward to Mars, and improve life here on Earth.”
This was the completion of the sixth ISS crew rotation flight performed by SpaceX under NASA’s Business Crew Program. Liftoff occurred at 12:34 a.m. EST (05:34 UTC) March 2 atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The capsule and its occupants docked with the space station about 25 hours later.
This was the fourth spaceflight for Bowen, who has now gathered 227 days in space. His other three flights were aboard space shuttle Endeavour in 2008, Atlantis in 2010 and Discovery in 2011.
Bowen is the one astronaut to fly in back-to-back space shuttle missions — STS-132 and STS-133. In January 2011, only a month before STS-133 was scheduled to fly to the ISS, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra was injured in a bicycle accident. Due to his spacewalk experience, Bowen was his substitute.
The 186-day Crew-6 mission was the primary spaceflight for Hoburg, Alneyad and Fedyaev.
Throughout nearly all of their mission, the Crew-6 quartet were a part of the larger seven-person Expedition 69 aboard the ISS. Over the course of the last six months they participated in a wide range of science experiments and technology demonstrations.
Three spacewalks were also performed. All three included Bowen, who was partnered with Hoburg for 2 and Alneyadi for one. All were performed in preparation and installation of two latest ISS Roll-Out Solar Arrays to enhance the outpost’s power supply.
Bowen’s 10 spacewalks over his 4 missions give him a profession total time of 65 hours and 57 minutes spent outside the ISS in a spacesuit. This puts him in third place for essentially the most extravehicular activity time, just behind former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria (now an astronaut for Axiom Space), who’s 10 spacewalks total 67 hours and 40 minutes.
The record for many spacewalks and spacewalk time by any person is held by former Soviet and Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Solovyev. His 16 spacewalks between 1988 and 1998 totaled 82 hours and 22 minutes, all outside the Mir space station.
Crew Dragon Endeavour accomplished its fourth flight. It was first utilized in 2020 for SpaceX’s first crewed flight, the Demo-2 mission to the ISS. Following its return to Florida, the capsule is slated to be inspected and refurbished by SpaceX before being prepared for its next mission.
SpaceX has 4 lively Crew Dragon capsules, the opposite three are named Resilience, Endurance and Freedom, which have each flown two, three and two times with Endurance currently on the ISS with NASA’s seventh crew rotation mission — Crew-7.
A fifth Crew Dragon is currently being built. It’s expected to be finished sometime next yr before being entered into service. SpaceX’s human-rated capsules are used for ISS crew rotation missions in addition to private missions to the ISS and solo low Earth orbit missions.
So far, SpaceX has flown 11 crewed missions since May of 2020, sending 42 people into orbit.
As an interesting comparison, throughout the first three years and three months of the space shuttle program, 11 missions were flown, also sending 42 people into space. Nonetheless, historically, because the space shuttle program progressed it flew more often and had the next seating capability.