It was a "found footage" film so the events didn't go entirely in sequence. Early on, there was footage with the crew talking about James' death. Then the film skipped ahead a bit - then it went back to James' death.
The ground module was not on the surface yet when James died. As another poster said, they brought Andre with them because he was unstable. Had things gone according to plan, James and Andre would have stayed on the orbital unit - but James was dead and Andre was crazy.
In the very last scene, the scientist doing the interview says that once communication with Earth was reestablished, the last astronaut opened the airlock so that the cameras would capture an image of the creature. So she sacrificed herself to get better evidence (well, she would have died anyway, but differently). That's why they went back to the shot of her saying that compared to the importance of the discovery, what were their lives really worth.
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