Two NASA astronauts, a Japanese space veteran and a Russian cosmonaut bid their seven space station crewmates farewell overnight Friday, strapped into their Crew Dragon capsule and undocked for a fiery Saturday night plunge to splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico to close out a 157-day mission.”Before we started, our flight director referred to Expedition 68 as the ‘Iron Man,'” pilot Josh Cassada said last week. “And that was before the universe started throwing curveballs our way, and then it got really crazy.”While we were up here, we did six spacewalks, we installed two solar arrays, we built the infrastructure for two more solar arrays and we fixed a broken old one. We had five cargo vehicles (visit) along with all the science and hardware that (supports) hundreds of experiments and thousands of researchers around the planet.”The Crew-5 astronauts, wearing their SpaceX pressure suits, bid their space station crewmates farewell before boarding a Crew Dragon spacecraft for return to Earth Saturday night. Left to right: cosmonaut Anna Kikina, pilot Josh Cassada, commander Nicole Mann and Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata. / Credit: NASAHe added, “we just want to say thank you, and we hope that we made you proud. If we didn’t, don’t tell us until we get home!”With commander Nicole Mann and Cassada monitoring cockpit computer displays, flanked by Koichi Wakata and cosmonaut Anna Kikina, the Crew-5 Dragon undocked from the International Space Station’s f …
