SpaceX's Crew-8 quartet of astronauts will at last depart the space station today following more than two weeks of weather-related delays.
The Dragon spacecraft for SpaceX Crew-8, called Endeavour, is set to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) on Wednesday (Oct. 23) at 5:05 p.m. EDT (2105 GMT). You can watch the event live via the NASA+ streaming service, formerly NASA Television, assuming the agency makes its webcasts available. SpaceX will also stream the undocking via X (formerly Twitter).
Crew-8 is expected to splashdown off the coast of Florida around 3:30 a.m. on Friday (Oct. 25). NASA will also livestream the splashdown on NASA+. A post-splashdown news conference is planned for later that morning.
Undocking has been delayed since Oct. 7 due to poor conditions in the splashdown area during and in the wake of Hurricane Milton, which hit Florida Oct. 9 and caused a temporary closure of NASA's Kennedy Space Center to all but essential personnel.
The Crew-8 astronauts include NASA's Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps and Alexander Grebenkin of Russia's space agency Roscosmos. The astronauts launched on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket March 3 and docked with the ISS on March 5.
Crew-8 is the eighth long-duration NASA/Roscosmos astronaut mission SpaceX has launched to the ISS. The mission's relief crew, Crew-9, arrived at the orbiting complex on Sept. 29 with NASA's Nick Hague and Roscosmos' Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Related: Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida with Category 5 strength in new ISS footage (video)
NASA is also deep in planning for astronaut missions in 2025. SpaceX's Crew-10 mission should launch no earlier than Feb. 25, NASA officials confirmed Oct. 15. This group will consist of NASA astronauts Anne McClain (commander) and Nichole Ayers (pilot), along with mission specialists Takuya Onishi from JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Kirill Peskov of Roscomos.
Crew-11 will be the next space station rotation, no earlier than July 2025, and NASA has not yet disclosed the crew members for that mission. The other commercial spacecraft responsible for NASA missions, Boeing's Starliner, may run a mission in 2025 pending an investigation of issues that arose during the first test astronaut mission, known as Crew Flight Test (CFT).
CFT astronauts Butch Williams and Suni Wilmore, both of NASA, remain on board the ISS after their Starliner spacecraft returned autonomously Sept. 6; the agency deemed spacecraft propulsion problems that arose after launch June 5 were too risky for the astronauts to make the ride home. The Crew-9 mission removed two NASA astronauts from the manifest to leave two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams to return to Earth in February 2025.
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