NASA and SpaceX’s seventh commercial mission begins its return to Earth

The four crew members of the seventh commercial space mission of the POT and SpaceX plan to depart this Monday from the International Space Station (ISS) back to Earth after the relief that arrived last Sunday at the orbital laboratory.

Astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, from NASA; Andreas Mogensen, from the European Space Agency (ESA); Satoshi Furukawa, from Japan’s JAVA, and Konstantin Borisov, from Russia’s Roscosmos, will return in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, the Endurance.

The spacecraft is scheduled to separate from the ISS today at 11:05 a.m. Eastern Time (3:00 p.m. GMT) and splash down at 5:35 a.m. Tuesday (9:35 a.m. GMT) off the coast of Florida.

The four travelers, who have been aboard the space station since last August 27, were relieved last Sunday by the SpaceX Crew-8 commercial mission, composed of NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin.

It was the eighth rotational flight for a new crew, and the ninth human spaceflight mission on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to the ISS for the Commercial Crew Program (CCP).

These commercial flights began in 2020 and have allowed the United States to send astronauts from American soil again after the cancellation of the space shuttle program in 2011.

Since the last flight of the shuttle Atlantis into Earth orbit in 2011, NASA had been forced to use only Russian launch systems such as the Soyuz to launch its astronauts into orbit.

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