Live coverage: Three Chinese astronauts return to Earth

A video from SpaceX shows the company’s Crew Dragon capsule plunging toward the Gulf of Mexico, then unfurling a series of parachutes to slow the spaceship carrying two NASA astronauts from 350 mph to a relatively gentle 15 mph for splashdown Sunday.

Armed with a knife, scissors and other cutting tools, cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev went outside the International Space Station on Dec. 11 to slice into the thermal insulation of a Soyuz spaceship and inspect the site of a repaired air leak that briefly caused a minor drop in air pressure in the research outpost earlier this year.

Russia may start sending just two of its cosmonauts to the International Space Station at a time, according to media reports and comments by a NASA manager, in a cost-cutting measure that could reduce the size of the research lab’s crew to five.