Crew Dragon Freedom touched down in the Pacific Ocean off Los Angeles at 11:34 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026, returning four Crew-12 members to Earth. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev had lived on the International Space Station for nearly eight months.
The landing handed the station to a seven-person crew and closed a mission that began with a Falcon 9 launch from Florida on Feb. 13, 2026. NASA’s station team described the four as Expedition 75 members spending their final full day aboard on Oct. 6, packing Dragon before the hatch closed.
The four who came home, and the Dragon that carried them
NASA’s Crew-12 image article says the four “spent nearly eight months aboard the International Space Station.” Meir served as commander and Hathaway as pilot, both for NASA, while Adenot and Fedyaev flew as mission specialists for ESA and Roscosmos respectively. The spacecraft was the SpaceX Dragon named Freedom.
The timeline is traceable to the day. According to NASA’s Crew-12 mission blog, the Falcon 9 lifted off on Feb. 13 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, and Dragon docked on Feb. 14 at 3:15 p.m. EST to the space-facing port of the Harmony module after roughly 34 hours of rendezvous. NASA’s station team counted 237 days in space for the crew at the planned landing time, which works out to just under eight months.
Adenot’s flight carried its own name in Europe. ESA’s εpsilon mission page lists a planned duration of nine months and a set of experiments that included PhysioTool, a study of how body and mind adapt to microgravity, and EchoFinder, which pairs augmented reality with AI. The actual stay, at 237 days, ran shorter than that plan, though the ESA page does not say why, and it gives no return date of its own. The same page identifies the flight as part of Expeditions 74 and 75, with launch on Feb. 13 at 10:15 GMT, matching the NASA record.
Undocking on Oct. 7 and the 11:34 a.m. splashdown
NASA’s broadcast schedule laid out the return in Eastern time: hatch closure on Wednesday, Oct. 7, undocking targeted no earlier than 8:05 a.m., then on Thursday a deorbit burn at 10:46 a.m. and splashdown at 11:34 a.m. The station blog logged the hatch closing at 9:20 a.m. EDT on Oct. 7, and a separate NASA undocking post recorded Dragon leaving Harmony’s space-facing port at 11:05 a.m. EDT, a few hours behind the first target. When Dragon left, five spacecraft were attached to the station, according to that post: the Crew-13 Dragon, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL, Soyuz MS-29 and the Progress 95 and 96 resupply ships.
The mission blog’s final entry on Oct. 8 reports that the deorbit burn was completed as planned and that the Dragon splashed down at 11:34 a.m. EDT, which is 8:34 a.m. Pacific time. Recovery teams, including two fast boats, moved in to secure the capsule and make it safe for the crew to be taken out. The page does not describe the crew’s condition after landing, so the first medical checks and the crew’s own accounts of the return had not been published when NASA’s blog entry went up.
That left a gap of roughly 24 hours between leaving the station and reaching the water, with NASA’s schedule showing audio-only communications during Dragon’s transit away from the station and full video resuming for the splashdown broadcast, which began at 10:20 a.m. EDT. Before reentry, NASA’s station team said, the crew would drink fluid with salt tablets to help their bodies readjust to gravity, and the Dragon was packed with personal items, cargo and scientific samples.
A station handed to Crew-13 and its companions
The station was not left thin. Crew-13, made up of Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Josh Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov, arrived on Oct. 1 and is scheduled to stay until spring 2027. Anil Menon, Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, who arrived on July 14, also remain through the spring.
The overlap was used for work as well as handover. In the days before departure, Watkins processed blood samples for a study of spaceflight-related clotting risk, and Adenot scanned Kutryk’s veins with the Ultrasound 3 device. With Crew-12 gone, seven residents remain aboard. Others on the station crew spent the same days on their own investigations: Delaney logged sleep, gave a saliva sample and set up a smartwatch for the RelaxPro study, Teteryatnikov recorded his breathing rate with a neck-worn acoustic sensor, Menon wore a sensor vest and headband to track his heart and breathing during exercise, and Dubrov and Kikina tested a body-worn control device for simulating robot manipulation in the Teledroid investigation.
NASA scheduled a space station briefing at 1:15 p.m. EDT after splashdown, covering the Crew-12 return and the upcoming SpaceX CRS-35 cargo launch. Crew-13 and the three July arrivals are all slated to stay until spring 2027, which leaves the cargo flight as the next scheduled arrival named in NASA’s briefing notice.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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