🚀Splashdown! Welcome home, Crew-6

Hi friends, it’s your Space Coast correspondent James Sparvero reporting on a successful flight back to Earth for the four crew members who spent the last six months living in space.

Pictured above, News 6 investigator Mike Deforest recorded Crew-6 reentering the atmosphere minutes before their SpaceX capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jacksonville at 12:17 a.m.

NASA astronauts Steve Bowen and Woody Hoburg, United Arab Emirates’ Sultan al-Neyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev returned after 186 days onboard the International Space Station as the sixth full-length crew working in low-Earth orbit under NASA’s Commercial Crew program partnership with SpaceX.

After recovery teams on the water secured the Dragon capsule, NASA said the crew was taken out of the spacecraft and received medical check ups before taking a helicopter ride to board a plane for Houston.

Crew-7 continues the work of Crew-6 after crew members Jasmin Moghbeli, Andreas Mogensen, Satoshi Furukawa and Konstantin Borisov launched to the station on Aug. 26.

📧 Have any topics you’d like to discuss? Send me an email here.

👋 Here’s a little bit more about me.

Little did I know when watching Apollo 13 in the third grade that 20 years later, I was destined for a thrilling career as your Space Coast multimedia journalist.

Chemistry and biology weren’t so interesting to me in high school science, but I loved my Earth and Space class (Thanks, Mr. Lang).

Then in 2016, I traded Capitol correspondent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for space correspondent. I’m proud that my first live report at News 6 happened to be the first time SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster on a barge. What seems so routine now was a really big deal that day in our newsroom!

From there, I’ve covered the Commercial Crew program and the return of human spaceflight to Kennedy Space Center (Demo-2 launched on my 33rd birthday!)

Now, as our coverage looks forward to missions to the moon and Mars, I often tell others I have the best job in local news. Because after all I’ve seen so far, I think I would be bored working somewhere else. I even bought a house near the Cape with a great view to the north so I never miss a launch even when I’m not working.

After seven years on the beat, though, I still consider myself a young space reporter and I always look forward to learning something new with every assignment.