Four space station crew members head for Friday return to Earth

Wrapping up an extended 235-day mission, three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut strapped into their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and undocked from the International Space Station on Wednesday, targeting a pre-dawn Friday splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

With Crew 8 "Endeavour" commander Matthew Dominick and co-pilot Michael Barrett monitoring cockpit displays, flanked on the right by cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin and on the left by NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps, the Crew Dragon undocked from the lab's Harmony module at 5:05 p.m. EDT and slowly backed away.

"Endeavour, departing," called space station commander Sunita Williams, ringing the ship's bell following naval tradition. "Fair winds and following seas."

Left behind aboard the station were Crew 9 commander Nick Hague and his crewmates, cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and Boeing Starliner astronauts Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Williams, along with Soyuz cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and NASA crewmate Donald Pettit.

If all goes well, the Crew 8 Dragon will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico at 3:29 a.m. Friday to close out a nearly eight-month-long mission spanning 3,776 orbits and 100 million miles since launch from the Kennedy Space Center on March 3.

The crew originally expected to return to Earth in September, but the flight slipped into early October in the wake of a decision to delay the Crew 9 launch from late August to late September to provide an eventual ride home for Wilmore and Williams.

The Starliner returned to Earth Sept. 7 without its crew on board because of safety concerns. The Crew 9 Dragon then was launched Sept. 28 with just two passengers, Hague and Gorbunov. That freed up two seats for Starliner commander Wilmore and co-pilot Williams, who will return to Earth next February with Hague and Gorbunov.

Sorting all that out pushed the Crew 8 departure into October. Dominick and company then were repeatedly held up by high winds and rough seas, much of it hurricane related, at splashdown sites in the Gulf of Mexico and along Florida's east coast.

But forecasters expected favorable conditions Friday, and the Crew 8 fliers were finally cleared to proceed with undocking.

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