Astronauts from US, India, Poland, Hungary return from space station

For the non-American crew, the ngo marked a instrumentality to crewed spaceflight for their respective nations aft decades.

A SpaceX capsule carrying astronauts from India, Poland, Hungary and the United States has landed successful California, completing the 20-day Axiom Mission 4.

The unit undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) connected Monday and landed connected world connected Tuesday aft a 22-hour journey.

The instrumentality formation concluded the 4th ISS ngo organised by US startup Axiom Space successful collaboration with SpaceX, the backstage rocket task of billionaire Elon Musk.

For the non-American trio, the ngo marked a instrumentality to crewed spaceflight for their respective nations aft decades.

The unit launched from the Kennedy Space Center successful the US authorities of Florida connected June 25 for a ngo wherever they conducted astir 60 technological experiments.

“Thanks for the large thrust … Happy to beryllium back,” Commander Peggy Whitson, an Axiom worker and erstwhile NASA astronaut, said aft the splashdown successful the Pacific Ocean disconnected San Diego.

Whitson, 65, retired from NASA successful 2018 aft a pioneering vocation that included becoming the US abstraction agency’s archetypal pistillate main astronaut and the archetypal pistillate ever to bid an ISS expedition.

Also connected committee were aviator Shubhanshu Shukla of India and ngo specialists Slawosz Uznanski-Wisniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary.

For rising abstraction powerfulness India, the information of Shukla, an Indian aerial unit pilot, is seen by India’s abstraction programme arsenic a precursor, of sorts, to the debut crewed ngo of its Gaganyaan orbital spacecraft, planned for 2027.

I articulation the federation successful welcoming Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla arsenic helium returns to Earth from his historical ngo to Space. As India’s archetypal astronaut to person visited International Space Station, helium has inspired a cardinal dreams done his dedication, courageousness and pioneering…

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) July 15, 2025

Uznanski-Wisniewski is simply a Polish astronaut assigned to the European Space Agency, portion Kapu is portion of his country’s Hungarian to Orbit (HUNOR) programme, though helium is not the archetypal idiosyncratic of Hungarian descent to committee the abstraction station.

Billionaire Charles Simonyi, a Hungarian-born bundle decorator who became a US national successful 1982, has doubly visited the ISS arsenic a abstraction tourist, successful 2007 and 2009, hitching rides connected committee Russian Soyuz capsules.

Axiom-4 besides marks the 18th crewed spaceflight logged by SpaceX since 2020, erstwhile Musk’s rocket institution ushered successful a caller NASA epoch by providing American astronauts their archetypal rides to abstraction from US ungraded since the extremity of the abstraction shuttle programme 9 years earlier.

Axiom is 1 of a fistful of companies processing a commercialized abstraction presumption of its own, intended to yet regenerate the ISS, which NASA expects to discontinue successful astir 2030.