The capsule that may carry the following crew to the Worldwide House Station has reached the SpaceX hangar on the mission’s launch pad.
The Crew Dragon Endurance will ferry the following set of astronauts to the International Station (ISS). That mission, referred to as Crew-10, is about to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no sooner than March 12, with NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Company) astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov on board. The quartet are headed for a roughly six-month keep aboard the orbital lab, relieving the Crew-9 astronauts at present wrapping up their rotation.
Two members of Crew-9, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, arrived on the ISS nicely forward of their crewmates, Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Williams and Wilmore launched to the space station in June 2024, on the primary crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. After Starliner skilled some malfunctions, NASA opted to return the spacecraft to Earth with out its crew onboard, out of an abundance of warning. That call meant integrating the Starliner astronauts into Crew-9, which arrived at the ISS some months later, in September. This additionally prolonged Williams and Wilmore’s mission from about 10 days to almost ten months in area.
The arrival of Crew-10 to the ISS will mark an imminent departure for the Starliner duo and the remainder of Crew-9. As is typical with handovers on the area station, crews overlap to make sure a easy transition of station upkeep and analysis duties whereas the brand new residents discover their area legs.
Crew-9 launched with Hague and Gorbunov and two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore on the return journey, aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom. Freedom has been docked to the ISS since its arrival in late September, and can function the journey house for all 4 astronauts per week or so following Crew-10’s docking.
Crew-10 was initially slated to fly a brand new Crew Dragon being manufactured by SpaceX so as to add to the corporate’s fleet, with a focused launch date someday in February. Final December, nonetheless, NASA announced a delay within the mission to “no sooner than late March,” to permit time for SpaceX to finish upkeep on the brand new spacecraft.
Additional delays on the Crew-10 Dragon, apparently mixed with political stress — as seen in online posts by President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk to convey house the “stranded” Starliner astronauts as quickly as potential — prompted NASA to reassign the Crew-10 spacecraft to a Dragon that may very well be able to fly sooner.
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Enter Endurance, the Dragon that has already flown three SpaceX astronaut missions — Crew-3, Crew-5 and Crew-7. The flight-proven spacecraft was readied for launch and has now reached SpaceX’s hangar at Launch Complex-39A, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, in Florida.
SpaceX shared images of the arrival, which apparently occurred someday in a single day, in a post on March 5. “Dragon arrives on the hangar at pad 39A forward of subsequent week’s launch of @NASA’s Crew-10 mission to the @Space_Station,” the corporate stated. Subsequent, Endurance shall be mated to its Falcon 9 launch vehicle and bear last checkouts earlier than rolling out to the launch pad.
Dragon arrives on the hangar at pad 39A forward of subsequent week’s launch of @NASA’s Crew-10 mission to the @Space_Station pic.twitter.com/cjb3f9jNZUMarch 5, 2025
Crew-10 is at present scheduled to launch at 7:48 p.m. EDT (2348 GMT) on March 12 and can take about 14 hours to catch as much as the ISS. Barring a delay to the present focused launch date, Endurance is scheduled to dock with the area station at roughly 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Thursday (March 13), which might put Crew-9 on a timeline to return to Earth earlier than the top of the month.
A livestream of the Crew-10 launch shall be out there on the Space.com homepage starting at 3:45 p.m. EDT (1945 GMT) on March 12, in addition to on NASA’s NASA+ streaming service. Docking protection will start the following day, March 13, at 8:15 a.m. EDT (1215 GMT), with an anticipated hatch opening round 11:45 a.m. EDT (1545 GMT).
