SpaceX crew Dragon Endurance docked to the International Space Station shortly after it began its midnight countdown on Sunday as a pair of Boeing Starliner astronauts who had been on the station since last summer were back.
The crew 10 spacecraft and space station both travelled through the Atlantic at 17,500 mph at about 260 miles, so the final approach moved less than 4 inches per second in durability.
At 12:04am, we first made contact with the port in front of the Harmony Module station. The four members of the mission are NASA astronauts and NASA astronauts Commander Anne McLain and pilot Nicole Ayers, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronauts Onisi and Ros Cosmos Cosno Kiril Peskov.
“It was so amazing to see the ISS shining in the darkness of the universe,” Onishi said after docking. “There is a lot of exciting work ahead of us.
Their arrival increased the space station population to 11, including Butch Wilmore and Snie Williams, who arrived at the station at Starliner on June 6, 2024 as part of the crew flight test, but later became members of crew nine.
Wilmore was an astronaut from Harmony Module. He was the first astronaut to welcome his replacement after Hatch opened at 1:35am.
All 11 people gathered to make a welcoming statement.
“When we looked out the window, we can’t convey the great joy of our crew to you. We saw the space station for the first time and came back for a few people first,” McClain said. “Tell me, it’s a really great journey. You can hardly even put it into words.”
All 10 of the four crew members were pilots before receiving the space allocation. It is McClain and Onishi’s second flight, and will take over the ISS command when Expedition 73 begins next month. The rookies are Pescov and Ayers, becoming the first members of the 2021 Astronaut class.
“Thank you to SpaceX for an amazing ride here,” she said. “As a rookie, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done and I can’t wait to work here. So I’m so excited that our four pilots are getting into space together. And now we have four astronauts together.”
The Crew 10 Quartet was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from the Kennedy Space Center on a roughly 29-hour trip to the station on Friday evening.
With its arrival, the Crew-9 mission will return to Earth with the freedom of the Crew Dragon in harmony with the Zenith Module. The spacecraft arrived last September with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Los Cosmos astronaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, but it flies with just two people rather than the usual four passengers.
The two empty seats are filled with Willmore and Williams to get back home.
Their CFT mission was designed to be as short as an eight-day stay, but Starliner suffered from thruster failures and helium leaks in the propulsion system, and in the end NASA sent the spacecraft home without a crew.
Photo: SpaceX Crew-10 will be released by Kennedy Space Center
The remaining Williams and Wilmore were then assigned to stay at the station as part of Expedition 72 and became members of the Crew 9 crew to return home. During his stay, Williams became commander of the space station, with both astronauts taking part in the spaceship.
The duo are making their third trip to space, which previously flew to both the Space Shuttle and the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Their flight in the crew’s dragon means they flew on four different spaceships, along with their flight in Starliner.
John Young of Orlando is the only astronaut with a similar resume and flew his first space shuttle flight over two Gemini and two Apollo missions. At Apollo 16, Young was walking the moon, so he flew in both the crew service module and the lunar module. He remains the only astronaut to launch and land on four different spacecraft.
Williams and Wilmore’s return could arrive by 4am Wednesday, allowing for at least two days of handover between the two crew, but departure will depend on the weather.
“It may be later than they got home Wednesday,” said Dina Contera, assistant manager of the International Space Station Program. “We’re trying to make our handovers shorter because we’ve been waiting for good weather recently and last year, so we don’t want to lose any good opportunities we may have.”
The duo spent 9 1/2 months on board.
“If you look at it mathematically in terms of the original planning mission percentage, this is the largest extension of the percentage,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s Director of Space Operations Missions. “That’s probably the way our engineers think about it in the future.”
He pointed out that other astronauts extended their mission.
“But every astronaut leaving for space should teach them and not think about when they will return home. Think about how well your mission is, and if you’re lucky, you may be able to stay longer. And when you can stay in space longer, it’s a real gift,” he said.
This is the fourth trip to the Space Station for Crew Dragon Endurance, visited with Crew 3 in 2021, Crew 5 in 2022, and Crew 7 in 2023.
NASA originally contracted with both SpaceX and Boeing to provide taxi services to US stations, allowing them to end their dependence on Russia to maintain their American presence at stations after the end of the Space Shuttle Program. The station has been a continuous crew for almost 25 years.
The Crew-10 is SpaceX’s 10th operating flight based on NASA’s commercial crew program, with Crew 11 set to fly as early as July. Meanwhile, NASA is still working to determine whether Starliner can be certified. This is already about five years behind SpaceX and will not have the first operational mission until 2026 if it can be certified.
Boeing still has a contract to fly Starliner’s six operational flights, but the space station’s lifespan is limited, and NASA has announced it will be excluded from it after 2030.
Meanwhile, since the first human spaceflight of the crew dragons nearly five years ago, SpaceX has flew 60 humans into space across flights 16 within a fleet of four crew dragons.
The fifth crew dragon was nearly finished and originally tasked with flying crew 10, but production delays had moderately extended the launch of the original target in February by late March.
Shortly after the announcement of the delay, he said he spoke to President Trump. Meanwhile, NASA could be facing even longer delays in SpaceX’s new crew dragon, and was already hoping for a switch.
The immediate announcement was a switch to endurance that was ready for the upcoming commercial Axiom Space AX-4 mission, allowing it to push the release date up for weeks. However, Wednesday’s first launch attempt was delayed two days due to another SpaceX issue where Crump, holding the Falcon 9, did not let go.
So instead of a potential return on Sunday, that return will be pushed on Wednesday.
“I think there’s a chance that they could splash out on the same day,” Contera said. “It depends on the transit times associated with where the tracks are lined up, and the opportunity for splashdowns selected in the Gulf Coast.”
SpaceX has eight potential landing sites on either coast of Florida, but NASA is targeting the West Coast. This includes the dry Tortugas site, which was first used in last year’s Polaris Dawn Mission, with some weather delays.
“I’ll just warn you,” Contera said. “It can be difficult for the weather to be better on the first day.”
Original issue: March 15th, 2025, 11:33pm EDT
