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The four people departing the International Space Station strapped into their Crew Dragon capsule and undocked early Wednesday, setting up re-entry and splashdown Thursday off the coast of Southern California to close out a 237-day stay in orbit.
With Crew 12 commander Jessica Meir and pilot Jack Hathaway at the controls, flanked on their left by European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and on the right by cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, the Crew Dragon “Freedom” backed away from the space-facing port on the forward Harmony module at 8:05 a.m. Eastern Time.
Sailing 260 miles above Cuba and the Bahamas, the capsule executed an automated loop over the top of the lab complex and slowly dropped away behind, exiting the safety zones around the station.
“We just wanted to give an enormous thank you to all of the team, our friends and colleagues on board the International Space Station, everybody in Houston, everybody at SpaceX, all around the world, with all of our international partners,” Meir radioed as the Crew Dragon departed. “We have had the most incredible of expeditions … and we will never forget it, and never forget all of your hard work.”
After enjoying a final day in weightlessness, Meir and Hathaway will monitor a nine-minute and 20-second firing of the Crew Dragon’s forward Draco thrusters starting at 10:46 a.m. ET on Thursday, setting up a fiery plunge back to Earth and splashdown off the coast of California at 11:34 a.m. ET.
Left behind aboard the space station were the Crew 13 fliers that replaced them — commander Jessica Watkins, pilot Luke Delaney, Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk and cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov — who were launched to the station on Oct. 1.
Also on board are Soyuz MS-29 commander Pyotr Dubrov, cosmonaut Anna Kikina and NASA astronaut Anil Menon, who launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 14. They plan to remain aboard the station for eight months while Crew 13 is planning a six-month tour of duty.
In a brief ceremony Sunday, Meir turned command of the station over to Dubrov, saying Crew 12’s departure would mark a “bittersweet” moment.
“We will be leaving our friends,” she said. “But we know that we are going home to our friends, to our families, to all of our team members on the ground. So it’s a lot of mixed, swirling emotions for all of us when one leaves a home like this up on the space station.”
She presented a symbolic “key to the space station” to Dubrov, who said “it’s a great honor and a great responsibility to be the commander of such a magnificent place like International Space Station.”
“It has a special meaning for me today, because 69 years ago on this day (Oct. 4) the first Sputnik was launched. Today is the dawn of the space era for humanity, and International Space Station is the greatest symbol of what we can do if we work together.”
The combined crews then gathered in a group hug, or “huggle,” as Meir described it, forming a circle with arms around each other’s shoulders.
With splashdown Thursday, Meir, Hathaway, Adenot and Fedyaev will wrap up a 237-day and five-hour mission, flying around the planet 3,792 times and logging nearly 101 million miles from start to finish.
Meir, wrapping up her second flight to the space station, will have logged a total of 442 days in space, completing four spacewalks during the Crew 12 mission and three during an earlier stay. Adenot carried out three back-to-back spacewalks of her own, including one with Meir and two with Menon.
