Washington: Four astronauts returned safely to Earth on Saturday, ending a five-month mission to the International Space Station (ISS) that began when they were sent to relieve two stranded NASA astronauts from Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule.

Their SpaceX spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off Southern California, a day after leaving the orbiting lab. “Welcome home,” SpaceX Mission Control radioed as the capsule landed under parachutes.

Aboard were NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi, and Russia’s Kirill Peskov, who launched in March to replace the crew originally assigned to Starliner’s botched test flight. Starliner’s technical problems had left Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams stuck at the ISS for more than nine months instead of the planned week. NASA ultimately ordered Boeing’s capsule to return to Earth empty, and shifted Wilmore and Williams to a SpaceX return mission shortly after McClain’s team arrived. Wilmore has since retired.

Before departure on Friday, McClain reflected on “some tumultuous times on Earth,” saying, “We want this mission, our mission, to be a reminder of what people can do when we work together, when we explore together.”

Back on Earth, McClain said she looked forward to “doing nothing for a couple of days” at home in Houston, while her crewmates craved hot showers and juicy burgers.

This was SpaceX’s third human Pacific splashdown, but the first involving a NASA crew in 50 years. The company shifted returns from Florida to California earlier this year to minimise risks from falling debris over populated areas — a change that back-to-back private missions experienced first.

The last time NASA astronauts finished a space mission in the Pacific was during 1975’s Apollo-Soyuz mission, a symbolic Cold War-era docking between American and Soviet crews in orbit.

With inputs from AP