The crew of the Crew-5 mission sent into space by a SpaceX rocket on behalf of NASA returned to Earth on Saturday after a five-month mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The capsule Endurance landed in the Gulf of Mexico shortly after 9 p.m. local time (3 a.m. in Paris) off the west coast of Florida, with on board the Japanese Koichi Wakata, the Russian Anna Kikina, as well as Nicole Mann and NASA’s Josh Cassada.
Crew-5, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida in October, was Koichi Wakata’s fifth space mission and the first for the other members. Nicole Mann became the first Native American sent into space. Before leaving the ISS, the crew met that of Crew-6, which left on 1is March to take over.
Less than a week earlier, a Russian Soyuz rocket lifted off from Kazakhstan to replace the MS-22 spacecraft, also Russian, which was damaged while docking with the ISS.
The three astronauts of MS-22, an American and two Russians, were initially due to return to Earth at the end of March, at the end of a six-month mission, but they will ultimately stay there for almost a year.
Cooperation on the ISS is the last area where Washington and Moscow have continued to work together since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24.