The
NASA astronauts who traveled to the
International Space Station in SpaceX's first crewed flight in May are expected to return to Earth on Aug. 2 after spending two months in orbit, a NASA spokesman said on Friday.
U.S. astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will gear up for the final benchmark test of SpaceX's so-called Demo-2 mission: a coordinated splashdown somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean that will cap NASA's first crewed mission from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.
Since 2011, when the U.S. space shuttle program ended, NASA astronauts have had to hitch rides into orbit aboard Russia's
Soyuz spacecraft.