Over the decades, it has become a common practice for crew to return to Earth in a different spacecraft than the one that took them to space.

In 2011, the Space Shuttle made its last flight without any replacement to transport astronauts between the ISS and Earth. That was in part driven by the cancellation of the Constellation Program ...

The crew planned to return home in mid-March aboard the space shuttle Atlantis ... Soyuz capsule unsafe to return to Earth, requiring a replacement ship to be launched to bring them home.

Nelson said lessons learned from NASA’s two space shuttle accidents played a role ... Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original ...

Nelson said lessons learned from NASA’s two space shuttle accidents played a role ... Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original ...

Nelson said lessons learned from NASA’s two space shuttle accidents played a role ... Last year, the Russian Space Agency had to rush up a replacement Soyuz capsule for three men whose original ...

One company is reviving a decades-old NASA idea to build a reusable space plane that could shuttle people and small ... Radian One wouldn't be a replacement for all rockets, though.