— Four astronauts splashed down off the coast of Florida aboard their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, capping off their six-month stay in space. Their journey kicked off Monday just after 2 pm ET when the astronauts strapped into the Crew Dragon capsule, which had remained attached to the International Space Station since it arrived with the crew in April. The spacecraft spent nearly nine hours slowly maneuvering through orbit, approaching the thick inner layer of Earth’s atmosphere before the Crew Dragon lit up its thrusters to safely slice into the air, deploy parachutes and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico around 10:30 pm Monday. ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, left, NASA astronauts Megan McArthur and Shane Kimbrough, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Aki Hoshide, right, are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft onboard the SpaceX GO Navigator recovery ship shortly after having landed in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, Monday, Nov. 8, 2021. Aubrey Gemignani/NASA A fleet of rescue ships awaited their arrival and brought the four astronauts — NASA’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from Japan — to safety. “It’s great to be back to planet Earth,” Kimbrough was heard saying in the moments after splashdown on NASA’s webcast. During their stay in space, Kimbrough, McArthur, Pesquet and Hoshide oversaw numerous science experiments and even tested the first chile peppers grown in space. They also conducted spacewalks — in which they don the iconic puffy white spacesuits to exit the space station to work on its exterior — and endured some harrowing challenges, such as working through the misfire of a new Russian module that attached to the ISS and briefly knocked it out of position. A ghostly image of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule — carrying the Crew-2 astronauts — as seen during their nighttime splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico as they return from the International Space Station on November 8. NASA The trek home presented one last challenge: Issues with the toilet on board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule left the astronauts without a bathroom option during their trip back home. Instead, the crew was forced to rely on “undergarments” — essentially adult diapers — during the nine-hour journey. During a press conference conducted remotely from the ISS on Friday, McArthur said using undergarments rather than the toilet is “suboptimal.” “But we are prepared to manage,” she said. “Spaceflight is full of lots of little challenges. This is just one more that we’ll encounter and take care of in our mission, so we’re not too worried about it.”