Four astronauts undocked from the International Space Station after 237 days in orbit, setting up a Pacific splashdown as their replacements settle in for a six-month tour.
Commander Jessica Meir and pilot Jack Hathaway guided Crew Dragon Freedom away from the station early Wednesday, closing out a long stay that took them around the planet thousands of times and left a fresh crew in charge overhead.
CBS News reported the capsule pulled free at 8:05 a.m. Eastern Time from the space-facing port on the forward Harmony module, then sailed about 260 miles above Cuba and the Bahamas as it completed an automated loop and dropped away from the lab complex.
European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev rode with them. The plan called for a nine-minute, 20-second burn of the capsule’s forward Draco thrusters at 10:46 a.m. ET Thursday, followed by splashdown off Southern California at 11:34 a.m. ET.
Meir, wrapping her second flight, radioed thanks on the way out.
"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,"
she said. She added that the crew had “the most incredible of expeditions” and would not forget the work that made it possible.
Crew 12 did not leave a vacuum behind. NASA’s Crew 13 reached the station on Oct. 1 with commander Jessica Watkins, pilot Luke Delaney, Canadian astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. They are set for a six-month tour.
Already aboard from an earlier flight were Soyuz MS-29 fliers Pyotr Dubrov, Anna Kikina, and NASA astronaut Anil Menon, who launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on July 14 and plan to remain about eight months.
On Sunday, Meir turned station command over to Dubrov in a brief ceremony and handed him a symbolic “key to the space station.” The group marked the moment with what she called a “huggle.”
Dubrov tied the day to space history.
"It's a great honor and a great responsibility to be the commander of such a magnificent place like International Space Station."
He noted the date fell 69 years after the first Sputnik launch and called the station “the greatest symbol of what we can do if we work together.”
The departing crew’s numbers show how long “home” had been in low Earth orbit. Mission clocks put the stay at 237 days and five hours. Freedom flew 3,792 orbits and logged nearly 101 million miles from start to finish.
Meir’s career total now stands at 442 days in space. She completed four spacewalks on this expedition and three on an earlier one. Adenot carried out three back-to-back spacewalks, including one with Meir and two with Menon.
Meir did not hide the pull of leaving a place that had become routine life for more than half a year.
"We will be leaving our friends. 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."
Hathaway shared the controls for undocking and was set to monitor the deorbit burn with Meir. Adenot sat to the left in the capsule; Fedyaev sat to the right.
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon again handled the ride home, the same commercial system NASA now leans on for routine crew transport. Houston flight controllers, SpaceX teams, and partner agencies on the ground got direct thanks from the departing commander as Freedom pulled clear.
The station itself stays fully staffed. Watkins and her Crew 13 partners inherit the U.S. segment workload. Dubrov holds overall command. Kikina and Menon continue their longer Soyuz increment. The handoff is the ordinary business of a laboratory that has run for decades through allied flights, commercial capsules, and steady rotation of people who actually fly the missions.
No injuries, anomalies, or recovery snags were reported in the undock account. The next public milestone was the Thursday thruster firing and the planned Pacific splashdown off Southern California, with Meir and Hathaway watching the burn that would drop Freedom out of orbit.
For taxpayers who fund NASA and the commercial crew program, the picture is straightforward: a U.S.-built capsule left on time, a trained crew came home after a full science expedition, and a fresh international team took the watch without drama.
When American engineering and steady crews do the job, the station keeps working, and the people who flew it get to come home.
