Updated 7 p.m. Eastern with earlier departure plans for Crew-9.
WASHINGTON — A Crew Dragon spacecraft with four people on board docked with the International Space Station March 16, setting up the departure of an existing station crew in the coming days.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance docked with the forward docking port on the Harmony module of the ISS at 12:04 a.m. Eastern, 29 hours after the spacecraft launched from the Kennedy Space Center on the Crew-10 mission. Hatches between the spacecraft and station opened about 90 minutes later.
Crew-10 delivered to the station NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese space agency JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. The four will spend about six months on the station.
Crew-10’s arrival sets the stage for the departure of Crew-9 on the Crew Dragon spacecraft Freedom. Crew-9 launched in September with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. They will return to Earth on Crew-9 along with NASA astronaut Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been on the station since June, arriving on the Boeing CST-100 Starliner test flight whose problems led NASA to bring that spacecraft back to Earth uncrewed.
Crew-9 was set to depart as soon as 4 a.m. Eastern March 19, Dina Contella, deputy manager of the ISS program at NASA, said at a briefing after the Crew-10 launch. The timing of the departure and splashdown, off the Gulf coast of Florida, will depend on weather conditions.
However, NASA announced March 16 that it was moving up the departure, citing near-term favorable weather that is expected to degrade later in the week. The Crew-9 Crew Dragon is now scheduled to undock at 1:05 a.m. March 18, with splashdown scheduled for approximately 5:57 p.m. Eastern the same day.
The handover between Crew-9 and Crew-10 is shorter than usual. “Last year, we’ve had some handovers that were more extended waiting on good weather, and so we don’t want to lose any good opportunities that we might have,” she said, adding it would also help them stretch consumables.
Starliner status
The arrival of Crew-10 and departure of Crew-9 has attracted outsized attention for a typical crew rotation mission because of Williams and Wilmore, often mischaracterized as “stranded” astronauts because of the problems with Starliner even though they have always been able, like other crewmembers of the ISS, to return in an emergency.
NASA and Boeing have said little about the status of investigation into the Starliner problems that forced the two astronauts to remain on the station far longer than expected. In January, members of NASA’s independent safety committee, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said NASA and Boeing had made “significant progress” in their post-flight assessments of Starliner from the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission but were still examining issues with thrusters whose performance led NASA to return the spacecraft uncrewed.
“We’re making good progress on closing out the inflight anomalies and the inflight observations” from that test flight, said Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, during a March 7 briefing, noting that about 70% of those issues were now closed.
“In parallel, we continue to work through the prop [propulsion] system issues, that being the helium leaks that we saw and then also the thruster degradation,” he said. That includes testing some new seals to correct the helium leaks as well as planned thermal testing of the “doghouses” on Starliner that host thrusters.
“Once we get through those campaigns, we’ll know a little bit better” when to schedule the next Starliner flight, adding that NASA still expected to certify the vehicle for crewed missions “towards the end of the year.”
He added, though, that a busy schedule of missions to the ISS might push the next Starliner flight into next year. “So we’ve got to go figure out, manifest wise, where does the Starliner fit? Does it fit best toward the end of this calendar year, the first flight back after CFT, or early next year?”
ISS future
Both Boeing and SpaceX have contracts for crew rotation missions to the ISS that would support operations through the end of the decade. However, SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk said Feb. 20 that the station should be deorbited “as soon as possible,” which he defined as two years from now, to free up resources for Mars missions.
Because Musk is a close adviser to President Trump, many wondered if his comments were more than idle musings but instead a sign of shifting policy by the White House on the future of the ISS. However, at the March 7 briefing, NASA officials said they have not received any direction to change current plans to operate the station through the end of the decade.
“Right now, we’re acting purely on policy guidance that we have in place, and that has us flying on ISS through 2030,” Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, said at the briefing. The other international partners have endorsed operating the ISS to 2030, he noted, except for Russia, which has committed only to 2028 at the moment.
Ending the ISS, he said, is dependent on both having the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle, a spacecraft that will dock to the ISS to perform the final phases of a controlled deorbit into the South Pacific, as well as least one commercial station in orbit to take over research being done on ISS.
Bowersox offered similar comments after the Crew-10 launch. “Elon’s all about going to Mars. He has been since he started SpaceX,” he said. “So it doesn’t surprise me that that he wants to focus on that. That excites me too.”
“But what I’ll tell you is our work in low Earth orbit — our work with ISS, the future work we’ll do on our commercial low Earth orbit platforms — is about Mars too, and one of the fastest ways to get to Mars is to do work in low Earth orbit,” he added.
