Four astronauts home from space station after successful splashdown

In this image provided by NASA, SpaceX capsule carrying four astronauts, parachutes into the Pacific Ocean off the Southern California coast on Saturday, August 9, 2025. KEEGAN BARBER / AP

An international crew of four astronauts is back home on Earth Saturday, August 9, after nearly five months aboard the International Space Station, returning safely in a SpaceX capsule. The spacecraft carrying US astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan's Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov splashed down off California's coast at 8.44 am local time.

Their return marks the end of the 10th crew rotation mission to the space station under NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which was created to succeed the Space Shuttle era by partnering with private industry. The Dragon capsule of billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX company detached from the International Space Station (ISS) at 2215 GMT on Friday.

The capsule's dizzying, 17-hour drop back down to Earth was slowed when it re-entered the atmosphere, then further reined in by the deployment of huge parachutes. After the capsule splashed down, it was recovered by a SpaceX ship and hoisted aboard. Only then were the astronauts able to breathe Earth's air again, for the first time in months.