'Welcome back to Earth': astronauts return from ISS in a SpaceX capsule

SpaceX brought four astronauts home with a midnight splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico on Friday.

A ship picked up a Dragon space capsule off the Florida coast early Friday, and the three U.S. astronauts and one German exited about an hour later.

NASA’s Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn and Kayla Barron, and the European Space Agency’s Matthias Maurer were in orbit for about six months.

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All four came out waving and giving thumbs-up as they were hustled away on rolling chaises for medical checks.

SpaceX brought up their U.S. and Italian replacements last week, after completing a charter trip to the station for a trio of businessmen.

That amounts to two crew launches and two splashdowns in barely a month.

Musk’s company has now launched 26 people into orbit in less than two years, since it started ferrying astronauts for NASA. Eight of those 26 were space tourists.

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