Hague and Gorbunov rode up to the station aboard Freedom in late September, on the launch of SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Williams and Wilmore, on the other hand, reached the ISS on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner capsule, which lifted off in early June.

Their return marks an unprecedented event in space travel, as no astronauts have ever had to switch spacecraft mid-mission between two different organizations. “There’s never been a situation like this where astronauts had to switch plans in the middle of their mission and come back on a totally different spacecraft,