Spacex brings home NASA’S Crew-3 astronauts
A group of first-time astronauts returned to Earth late Thursday night, shedding their titles as rookies after six months on the International Space Station.
Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, of NASA, and Matthias Maurer, of the European Space Agency, returned in a Spacex Crew Dragon that landed off the coast of Tampa, Fla., at 11:43 p.m. CDT. The three first-time flyers were accompanied by NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, who had previously flown in the space shuttle and Russian Soyuz capsule.
All four crew members participated in spacewalks during the NASA mission. They also welcomed the space station’s first all-private crew and overlapped with record-setting NASA astronaut
Mark Vande Hei who spent 355 days in orbit, the longest single spaceflight by an American.
“Having three first-time flyers on the crew, it’s been really special to have this experience and especially to have Tom here as a
mentor,” Barron said in a news conference before leaving the space station. “The spacewalks were absolutely incredible. That was something I was really hoping I would get the chance to do, and we were super lucky because we all got the chance to do a spacewalk. We had a fantastic time out there doing some amazing work, looking down at our beautiful planet.”
For Marshburn, it was emotional suiting up his crewmates for their first spacewalks.
“I had a hard time getting any work done,” Marshburn said. “I was going window to window to watch them to make sure they were OK. And of course they did a fabulous job.”
Though there was a bit of a learning curve for the first-time flyers. It was particularly difficult to get their bearings on the station, where there is no floor and ceiling. Every nook and cranny is used.
Maurer said he would put something on the wall and think, “OK, I know where it is.” But then he moved and looked at it from a different perspective and he lost that item. Chari described difficulties coming around the corner and knowing where he was in the station. It took a while before he could instantly orient. For Barron, her brain struggled to filter the clutter (the station requires a lot of equipment to keep the astronauts alive and to conduct science) and determine what she needed to pay attention to and what she could ignore.
“Now, it’s just second nature to all of us,” she said.
The Crew-3 astronauts reached the International Space Station on Nov. 11. They passed the torch to the Crew-4 mission astronauts — Kjell Lindgren, Bob Hines and Jessica Watkins of NASA and Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency — who reached the station on April 27.