CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After some uncertainty and a few delays, the SpaceX mission to send a relief crew for the space station’s current astronauts is set to lift off later today (March 12).
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is poised to launch the Crew-10 mission for NASA, ferrying a crew of four to the International Space Station (ISS) for a six-month residency. The rocket and its Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft are set to lift off from Launch Complex-39A here at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) today at 7:48 p.m. EST (2348 GMT). Aboard are NASA astronauts Anne McClain (mission commander) Nichole Ayers (the pilot), along with mission specialists Takuya Onishi of JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Kirill Peskov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
Coverage of tonight’s launch is scheduled to begin at 3:45 p.m. EDT (1945 GMT), with a livestream available at the top of this page and on Space.com homepage, as well as on NASA’s NASA+ streaming service and SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission page and through the company’s account on X.
McClain and her crewmates will spend about 14 hours after launch catching up to the ISS before docking with the orbiting lab on Thursday (March 13). The arrival of Crew-10 will spark the imminent departure for their counterparts aboard the station, members of the Crew-9 mission. Two of those astronauts, NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Aleksandr Gorbunov, arrived aboard the orbital laboratory last September aboard the Crew Dragon Freedom, which was flown with two additional, empty seats.
Those seats were reserved for NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore. Williams and Wilmore arrived at the ISS a few months before Hague and Gorbunov, aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which returned to Earth without Williams and Wilmore aboard.
Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) — the vehicle’s first-ever astronaut mission — launched on June 5, 2024. Starliner did not fare as well as Boeing and the space agency had hoped; malfunctions on the vehicle once on orbit prompted NASA to indefinitely extend Williams and Wilmore’s 10-day mission aboard the ISS while the problem was worked through on the ground.
In late August, the agency decided that Starliner would complete its mission uncrewed, and its astronauts would be absorbed into the Crew-9 manifest when they arrived to the space station three weeks later. Williams and Wilmore would return aboard Freedom at the end of the Crew-9 mission, which was originally scheduled for February.
That return date was pushed back as the target for Crew-10’s launch date fluctuated, however, bouncing from February to “late March,” and then back up to the first half of this month.
Crew-10 had initially been slated to launch aboard a new Crew Dragon being built by SpaceX, but delays in that process caused NASA to delay the Crew-10 mission while final manufacturing was completed. Further delays — which are common with new spacecraft, as NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich noted — led NASA to opt for Crew-10 to fly sooner, on the flight-proven Crew Dragon Endurance.
The spacecraft back-and-forth gained extra attention, as any delay to the Crew-10 mission meant a longer wait in space for Williams and Wilmore — a topic with an increasing presence in headlines as the launch date has gotten closer. Reports of the “stranded” Boeing astronauts were elevated in the media by statements made by President Trump and SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, who cast blame on the Biden administration for “abandoning” Williams and Wilmore to a limbo-like wait in low Earth orbit.
Now, with Crew-10’s launch and subsequent arrival at the ISS imminent, Crew-9 has begun preparations for their return home. Crew overlaps aboard the ISS normally last about a week, so newly arriving astronauts have a chance to acclimate to the microgravity environment while they take over research experiments and station maintenance.
Crew-9, however, is on the fast track home; it’s expected to depart within just three days of the new crew’s arrival. That arrival is expected tomorrow (March 13), around 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT), with an expected docking at 6 a.m. EDT (1000 GMT). Coverage of the arrival can also be streamed on the Space.com homepage, and on NASA’s NASA+ streaming service beginning at 4:15 a.m. EST (0915 GMT), Thursday.
