Crew-8 launched in March 2024 with Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, together with Alexander Grebenkin of Roscosmos, and it became one of the longer rotations — 235 days, extended well beyond the planned six months by circumstances elsewhere on the station.
The extension traced back to Starliner. When Boeing's crewed test flight was judged unsafe to return its own astronauts, those two were absorbed into the station's complement and the schedule of arrivals and departures had to be rearranged around them, with knock-on effects for the crews already aboard.
Jeanette Epps had waited a long time for the flight. Assigned to a Soyuz mission in 2018 and removed from it months before launch for reasons NASA never publicly explained, she was reassigned to Starliner, then moved again to Dragon after that vehicle's delays — a seventeen-year gap between selection and spaceflight.
Barratt, a physician making his third flight at 64, brought an unusual professional perspective: he had spent much of his career on the medicine of long-duration spaceflight and was now a subject of it, aboard a station whose accumulated human data he had helped design the collection of.
The return in October 2024 was complicated by a medical issue that briefly hospitalised one crew member after splashdown, an event NASA handled with more privacy than transparency and which drew some criticism. All four recovered, and the episode was a reminder that readaptation to gravity after eight months is not a formality.
