Four astronauts of Axiom Space's Ax-4 mission have completed their journey aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Their ship is the Crew Dragon “Grace” today, 14 July, about 7:15 Eastern Time (14:15 outside Kyiv) successfully undocked from the station, beginning the return to Earth.
The return to the planet is scheduled for Tuesday, 15 July, close 12:30 behind Kyiv in the Pacific Ocean near the coast of California. This will be SpaceX's second water landing on the West Coast — the company eventually switched to landings in the Pacific Ocean due to incidents of debris falling from spacecraft modules after entering the atmosphere.
The mission is headed by Peggy Whitson, former NASA astronaut, and now director of manned flights at Axiom. This is her fifth mission in space, and total time, spent in space, now is 695 days is the highest among Americans.
Her crew:
Doubt “Shaks” Shukla is an Indian Air Force pilot, a candidate for ISRO's first manned flight “Will be like that”;
Slavosh “Suav” Uznanskyi-Wyshnevskyi is a representative of Poland and ESA;
Tibor Kapu is a Hungarian from the national space program HUNOR.
For the last three, it was the first flight into space, and all of them became the first representatives of their countries, who visited the ISS.
The Ax-4 mission has begun 26 June from the LC-39A pad of the spaceport at Cape Canaveral (Florida) using the Falcon rocket 9. The crew stayed at the ISS 2,5 week, although there were originally planned to be about two.
Astronauts performed over 60 scientific experiments and technology demonstrations from 31 countries is a new record for Axiom.