{"id":482896,"date":"2026-02-16T03:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T03:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/482896\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T03:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T03:49:08","slug":"space-station-returns-to-a-full-crew-complement-after-a-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/482896\/","title":{"rendered":"Space Station returns to a full crew complement after a month"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Running solo<\/p>\n<p>After these astronauts departed on January 15, just a single NASA astronaut, Chris Williams, remained in orbit. He had reached space on board a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in November, alongside two Russian cosmonauts, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. The space station is a big place, and with much of the facility now more than two decades old, Williams had to spend the majority of his time on maintenance and monitoring activities.<\/p>\n<p>Back on Earth, NASA and SpaceX engineers were busy too. Because Crew 11 was brought home more than a month early, NASA and SpaceX scrambled to launch the Crew-12 vehicle a little sooner than expected, to minimize the time Williams had to manage the large US segment of the station on his own.<\/p>\n<p>            <a class=\"cursor-zoom-in\" data-pswp-width=\"1371\" data-pswp-height=\"771\" data-pswp- data-cropped=\"false\" href=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Clipboard_02-15-2026_01.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><br \/>\n              <img width=\"1371\" height=\"771\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Clipboard_02-15-2026_01.jpg\" class=\"fullwidth full\" alt=\"\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\"  \/><br \/>\n            <\/a><\/p>\n<p>\n              Expedition 74 welcomes NASA\u2019s SpaceX Crew-12 members aboard the International Space Station. In the front from left are Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos;Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, both from NASA; and Sophie Adenot from ESA (European Space Agency). In the back are Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos, Chris Williams of NASA, and Sergei Mikaev of Roscosmos.\n                          <\/p>\n<p>\n      Expedition 74 welcomes NASA\u2019s SpaceX Crew-12 members aboard the International Space Station. In the front from left are Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos;Jack Hathaway and Jessica Meir, both from NASA; and Sophie Adenot from ESA (European Space Agency). In the back are Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of Roscosmos, Chris Williams of NASA, and Sergei Mikaev of Roscosmos.<\/p>\n<p>That culminated with a successful Dragon launch early on Friday, with the reinforcements reaching the space station on Saturday evening.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis mission has shown, in many ways, what it means to be mission focused at NASA,\u201d said the space agency\u2019s administrator, Jared Isaacman, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bw7KDYTfdmM\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">during a post-launch news conference<\/a>. \u201cIn the last couple of weeks we brought Crew 11 home early, we pulled forward Crew 12, all while simultaneously making launch preparations for the Artemis II mission. It\u2019s only possible because of the incredibly talented workforce we have here at NASA alongside our contractors, and our commercial and international partners.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Running solo After these astronauts departed on January 15, just a single NASA astronaut, Chris Williams, remained in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-482896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}