Crew-12 Astronauts Splash Down Off California After Nearly Eight Months on the Space Station
NASA's Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos' Andrey Fedyaev landed in the Pacific aboard a SpaceX Dragon on Thursday after a mission that included seven spacewalks.
Three astronauts and a cosmonaut from NASA's Crew-12 mission are back on Earth after an almost eight-month stay on the International Space Station. Their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Los Angeles on Thursday, October 8, 2026.
The crew was commanded by NASA's Jessica Meir. Jack Hathaway served as pilot, and the mission specialists were Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and Andrey Fedyaev of Russia's Roscosmos. Crew-12 lifted off in February on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and docked with the station the next day. It was the 20th time SpaceX had flown humans into orbit.
The trip home began about 45 minutes before splashdown, with the spacecraft traveling at an orbital speed of roughly 17,500 mph. The Dragon fired its thrusters to nudge itself out of orbit, then plunged into the atmosphere. Its ablative heat shield withstood temperatures of up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit during a fiery reentry.
Over about half an hour the capsule slowed to a few hundred miles per hour. Four orange-and-white parachutes then took over and eased the spacecraft down to about 16 mph before it touched the water.
During their time in orbit, NASA said, the crew completed dozens of science experiments, including studies of stem cells, how crystals grow in space and bone loss in microgravity. Not all of the work happened inside the station. Meir conducted four spacewalks totaling just over 27 hours to maintain and upgrade the aging orbital outpost, and Adenot performed three spacewalks of her own.
Before Crew-12 left, its members were relieved by the four people of Crew-13, who arrived at the station last week to begin a six-month rotation. That handover meant the outpost was never left without a full complement of crew.
At a pre-departure news conference aboard the station last month, Meir said she could not wait to be reunited with her 3 1/2-year-old daughter. There was something else she had missed after so long in orbit. "So looking forward to seeing nature again, feeling the breeze on my face, the wind rustling through the leaves," she said, adding that she was eager for "all those things that we don't have up here."
The two-time space veteran said there were two things she would miss about space: weightlessness and the views of Earth. Splashdown off the California coast is the standard return route for SpaceX crew missions, and recovery teams were on hand to retrieve the capsule and help the crew out.
The return closes a long stretch for the station's research program. Studies of bone loss in microgravity matter for any future mission that keeps people in space for months at a time, while crystal-growth experiments probe how materials form without the pull of gravity. Crew-13 will now carry that work forward through the winter.
