The four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission will return to Earth on Thursday (Oct. 8) nearly eight months in space, and you can watch their homecoming live.
Crew-12's Crew Dragon capsule, named "Freedom," undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday (Oct. 7) at 8:05 a.m. EDT (1205 GMT). If all goes according to plan, Freedom will splash down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California on Thursday at 11:34 a.m. EDT (1534 GMT).
Return-to-Earth coverage will begin on Thursday at 10:20 a.m. EDT (1420 GMT). Freedom will conduct its deorbit burn around 10:46 a.m. EDT (1446 GMT), then splash down in the Pacific at 11:34 a.m. EDT (1534 GMT). You can watch that coverage here when the time comes, courtesy of NASA.
Then, at 1:15 p.m. EDT (1715 GMT) on Thursday, NASA and SpaceX will hold a press conference to discuss Crew-12's homecoming and the launch of the company's robotic CRS-35 cargo mission to the ISS, which is targeted for Oct. 13. Participants in the briefing are:
- Bill Spetch, deputy manager of Commercial, NASA's Low Earth Orbit Program
- Dr. Liz Warren, deputy chief scientist, NASA's Low Earth Orbit Program
- Lee Echerd, senior mission manager, Customer Operations and Integration, SpaceX
- Andreas Mogensen, leader, Human Exploration Group, European Space Agency (ESA)
The Crew-12 astronauts are Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway of NASA, ESA's Sophie Adenot, and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Meir and Fedyaev had each been to space once before, while Crew-12 was the first mission for Hathaway and Adenot.
The quartet launched to the ISS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 13. Their arrival brought the station up to its normal complement of seven crewmembers. It had been operating with a skeleton crew of three since Jan. 15, when SpaceX's Crew-11 mission headed home a month early to deal with a medical issue experienced by one of its astronauts, NASA's Mike Fincke.
That was the first medical evacuation in the long history of the ISS. But it was not an emergency situation, NASA officials stressed at the time, and Fincke is doing fine now here on terra firma. (He retired in August with a total of 549 days in space, the fourth-most ever for a NASA astronaut.)
Crew-12, in turn, has been relieved by the four-person Crew-13, which arrived at the ISS last Thursday (Oct. 1). Crew-13 made it to the station less than eight hours after launch — the quickest-ever ISS trip for an American spacecraft. (The world record is just over three hours, by a Russian Soyuz crewed vehicle.)
Crew-13 was originally supposed to launch on Sept. 12. However, an issue with the propulsion system on its Crew Dragon capsule, named "Grace," pushed things back, giving Crew-12 a few extra weeks in orbit.
The Crew-12 astronauts were very busy during their nearly 10 months off Earth, performing a variety of maintenance work and dozens of scientific experiments.
Then there were the spacewalks. Meir performed four of them, bringing her lifetime total to seven. And on Aug. 18, Adenot stepped outside the ISS, becoming the first French woman ever to walk in space. She did two more over the next two weeks, including one with Meir, which was just the sixth all-female extravehicular activity in the station's history.
The Crew-12 astronauts are doubtless feeling a mix of emotions about their homecoming, as big transitions are always bittersweet. Indeed, Meir gave us a sense of this a few weeks back.
"What I'm looking forward to most is seeing my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter,” Meir said during a Sept. 16 call with reporters from the station.
"I'm so looking forward to seeing nature again," she added, "feeling the breeze on my face, the wind rustling through the leaves, experiencing all those things that we don't have up here. But I will very, very much miss being weightless all the time and the incredible views that we have."
Editor's note: This story was updated at 8:30 a.m. ET on Oct. 7 with news of successful undocking. It was updated again at 6 p.m. ET that day to correct its headline, which previously said the Crew-12 astronauts have spent nearly 10 months in space.
