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US Crew Dragon spacecraft with Ax-4 astronaut team safely returns to Earth

The journey to the orbital station took slightly over 24 hours

NEW YORK, July 15. /TASS/. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft with a four-member team of the Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) safely splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the US state of California on Tuesday.

"Splashdown of Dragon confirmed - welcome back to Earth," SpaceX wrote on its X social network page.

The spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on Monday. The journey to the orbital station took slightly over 24 hours. The crew, consisting of former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, Hungarian astronaut Tibor Kapu, Poland’s Slawosz Uznanski, and Indian Air Force test pilot Shubhanshu Shukla, spent approximately 18 days aboard the ISS.

The launch, originally scheduled for May, was postponed multiple times due to weather conditions and technical issues including a liquid oxygen leak. NASA and Axiom Space conducted their first all-private astronaut mission to the ISS in April 2022.

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