Hague and Gorbunov arrived at the station in late September, on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Williams and Wilmore have been in orbit since early June, when they launched on the first crewed mission of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.

The Crew 10 Dragon capsule caught up with the International Space Station and moved in for a textbook docking early Sunday, bringing four fresh crew members to the lab and clearing the way for the Starliner astronauts to return to Earth after nearly 300 days in space.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were stuck in space for more than nine months, are finally on their way back home to Houston. Wilmore and Williams left the International Space Station in a SpaceX capsule early Tuesday with two others and are due to splash down in the evening off the Florida coast, weather permitting.