4 astronauts on board.. the Crew Dragon capsule returning from a mission in space

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule landed safely Saturday off the coast of Florida with four astronauts on board after a five-month science mission to the International Space Station.

The webcast of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and SpaceX showed the capsule parachuting into the waters off the coast of Tampa just after 9 p.m. EST (0200 GMT) with the four astronauts on board after a nearly nine-hour flight from the orbiting research laboratory.

The mission team, dubbed Crew-5, blasted off from Florida on Oct. 6 to conduct a routine science mission aboard the station.

The team included astronaut Anna Kikina, 38, the first Russian woman on board a US spacecraft in 20 years, and flight commander Nicole Onabu Mann, 45, a NASA astronaut and the first Native American to travel to space.

Also on board the capsule were astronaut Josh Kasada (49 years) from NASA and Japanese Koichi Wakata (59 years) from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The mission was the sixth manned flight of SpaceX for NASA since the launch of the Crew Dragon spacecraft for the first time in May 2020, when manned launches resumed from American soil, nearly a decade after the United States relied on the Russian Soyuz program to head to the International Space Station.

Team replacement

And at the beginning of this month, the SpaceX Dragon capsule, which carried four astronauts on board, docked with the International Space Station.

The docking occurred at a time when NASA cameras were unable to provide live images of the event.

Through this process, a team consisting of Russian, American and Japanese astronauts, who had been at the station since last October, was replaced by a crew consisting of an Emirati and a Russian astronaut who joined two colleagues from the US Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).