Crew-4 flew in April 2022 with Kjell Lindgren, Robert Hines and Jessica Watkins, joined by Samantha Cristoforetti of Italy. Watkins, a geologist who had worked on the Curiosity rover team, became the first Black woman to serve a long-duration expedition aboard the station.
That milestone arrived nearly four decades after the first Black woman flew in space, and Watkins was straightforward about the gap: visiting for a week and living somewhere for six months are different things, and the assignments that lead to long-duration flights had taken a long time to open up.
Cristoforetti took command of the station partway through the expedition, becoming the first European woman to do so. She had previously held the record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman, and she used a substantial part of her public communication from orbit on science outreach in several languages.
The mission ran 170 days and overlapped with the first entirely private crewed mission to the station, whose four occupants arrived on a separately purchased Dragon — an arrangement that raised practical questions about crew time, since the professional astronauts ended up supporting visitors who had paid for their own flights.
It was a period in which the station's operating model was visibly shifting: commercial vehicles, commercial visitors, and planning already under way for commercial stations to succeed it. The research programme continued regardless, with the crew running experiments on immune function, materials and plant growth in a laboratory approaching its twenty-fifth year.
