Astronaut Matthew Dominick, a University of San Diego graduate who has spent the past 7 1/2 months aboard the International Space Station, safely returned to Earth Friday with three colleagues in a SpaceX Dragon capsule, NASA said. The crew splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola, Florida, at 3:29 a.m. EDT. Dominick, the mission’s commander, was accompanied by astronauts Michael Barrett and Jeanette Epps and by cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin. The quartet traveled 100 million miles on ISS, which fully orbits Earth once every 90 minutes. This was the first mission for the 42-year-old Dominick, who earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at USD in 2005. He then became a naval aviator and made 400 aircraft carrier landings, many in support of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. Dominick, who joined NASA in 2017, is a member of Project Artemis, NASA’s effort to place humans on the moon for the first time since the early 1970s. The space agency says the first attempt at a crewed lunar landing is likely to occur in late 2026.