NASA will welcome home six Expedition 74 crew members at a public event in Houston on November 17

NASA will hold a public welcome-home event for the Expedition 74 crew at Space Center Houston, the visitor center of its Johnson Space Center, the agency said on November 10, 2026. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway and Chris Williams, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev are to present highlights of their time on the International Space Station at 6 p.m. CST on Tuesday, November 17. That is midnight UTC at the start of November 18, by our conversion. An awards ceremony for people who contributed to the mission follows the talk.

Two spacecraft, one expedition

The six reached the station on two different vehicles. Williams, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev launched on Soyuz MS-28 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on November 27, 2025, and landed under parachutes southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on July 26, 2026. NASA counts 241 days in space, 3,856 orbits of Earth and more than 102 million miles traveled. It was the first spaceflight for Williams and Mikaev and the second for Kud-Sverchkov.

Meir, Hathaway and Adenot launched on a SpaceX Dragon on February 13 as part of NASA's Crew-12 mission, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, and splashed down in the Pacific off Los Angeles on October 8. The four people on Crew-12 spent 237 days in space, completing more than 3,792 orbits and traveling more than 100 million miles, NASA says. It was Meir's second mission and the first for Hathaway and Adenot. The fourth Crew-12 member, Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev, will not be at the event.

What the expedition worked on

NASA credits the Expedition 74 crew with more than 1,400 hours of science and technology work. Its list includes tests of metal and tissue 3D printing, studies of blood flow and of how well people pilot vehicles when gravity changes, and the activation of a new compact exercise system. The crew also crystallized proteins for cancer medicines, worked on tumor-targeting treatments, grew stem cells for therapies, and cared for the first plants studied outside curated growth systems, according to the agency. They evaluated life-support and environmental systems that NASA says are critical to future exploration under its Artemis program, and upgraded an instrument used to study matter and develop quantum technologies.

Who is aboard now

The station is now crewed by Expedition 75, according to NASA's station blog: commander Pyotr Dubrov and flight engineers Anna Kikina and Sergey Teteryatnikov, who work in the station's Roscosmos segment; NASA's Anil Menon, Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney; and Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency. On November 5, Kutryk and Menon installed the eighth roll-out solar array during a spacewalk lasting six hours and 59 minutes. NASA says that completed a years-long effort to raise the station's power generation capacity from 160 kilowatts to 215 kilowatts, about 30% more.

On November 12 the crew was packing a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft, which delivered more than 6,300 pounds of science, supplies and hardware on October 15, for its trip home. It is to bring back samples such as bacterial DNA and 3D-printed blood vessels, along with lighting hardware designed to mimic natural daylight that NASA says is returning after more than three years of testing. The capsule will splash down in the Pacific Ocean, the blog says, without giving a departure date.

What comes next

After the Houston event and Dragon's departure, more cargo is due. NASA's launch schedule lists Northrop Grumman's CRS-25 cargo mission for no earlier than November 29 and Roscosmos's Progress 97 for no earlier than fall 2026. Both are targets until the rockets fly; our explainer on CRS-25 covers what the Cygnus carries.