NASA's Crew-12 Splashed Down Off California After 237 Days in Space
Dragon Freedom touched down in the Pacific at 8:34 a.m. Pacific time on 8 October with four crew members, ending a flight that included 235 days on the International Space Station.
Friday, October 9, 2026/2 min read
NASA's Crew-12 astronauts are back on Earth. The SpaceX Dragon capsule Freedom splashed down in the Pacific off the California coast at 8:34 a.m. Pacific time (11:34 a.m. Eastern) on Thursday 8 October, according to SpacePolicyOnline. It brought NASA's Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev home after 237 days.
Of those, 235 days were spent aboard the International Space Station. UPI notes in a photo caption that the crew launched on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral on 13 February, and NASA's own image page confirms the capsule came down off the California coast.
How the landing went
The SpaceX recovery ship Shannon had the capsule within an hour, SpacePolicyOnline says, and UPI describes the ship's team hoisting Freedom onto the deck and helping the astronauts out. From there the crew flew by helicopter and then by aeroplane to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. Adenot and Fedyaev will travel on to Europe and Russia.
The four now begin a 45-day programme to readjust to gravity, UPI reports. Meir's career total stands at 440 days in space, which UPI says places her in NASA's top ten for cumulative time.
What the crew did in orbit
The crew carried out four spacewalks. Meir did four on this flight, on top of three in 2019, SpacePolicyOnline says, and Adenot did three, which made her the first French woman to walk in space. Hathaway and Adenot were on their first flights. Fedyaev, who also flew on Crew-6 in 2023, is the first person to fly on a Crew Dragon twice.
The research list ran from the clinical to the practical. Experiments covered venous thrombosis in spaceflight, a way of producing intravenous fluids on board, and the expansion of stem cells.
Who is aboard now, and what comes next
The station is back to a crew of seven. Crew-13, which UPI says launched on 1 October and reached the station in record time, arrived about a week before Crew-12 left. SpacePolicyOnline lists NASA's Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canada's Josh Kutryk and Roscosmos's Sergey Teteryatnikov from Crew-13, with Roscosmos's Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina and NASA's Anil Menon from Soyuz MS-29.
The traffic does not slow. Northrop Grumman's Cygnus CRS-24 is due to undock today, 9 October, with NASA's live coverage starting at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, and it will burn up on reentry on Sunday along with the station's waste. A SpaceX cargo Dragon, SPX-35, is scheduled to launch on Tuesday 13 October at 6:33 a.m. Eastern carrying the final two iROSA solar arrays, which will join six already installed, and to dock on Thursday 15 October. That same day, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern, the Crew-12 astronauts hold their post-mission news conference at Johnson, and on 19 October Japan's MMX mission is due to leave for Mars from Tanegashima.
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