NASA and SpaceX are preparing to bring four International Space Station crew members home this week, days after their replacements arrived on the quickest flight a U.S. spacecraft has ever made to the orbiting laboratory.
The Crew-12 team is set to undock in its SpaceX Dragon capsule at 1:05 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, Oct. 7, at the earliest, NASA said Saturday. If that timeline holds, the crew would splash down off the California coast at about 11:25 a.m. EDT Thursday, Oct. 8. The agency said it would confirm the exact landing site and time closer to departure.
NASA had earlier said the astronauts could start home as soon as Monday, weather permitting. On Friday, the agency said teams were watching conditions off California and had more weather briefings planned for the weekend.
The returning crew consists of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, Sophie Adenot of the European Space Agency and Andrey Fedyaev of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. They launched Feb. 13 and have spent more than seven months in orbit. On Sunday, Meir passed command of the station to Russian cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov at a farewell and change-of-command ceremony.
A record-setting arrival
Their replacements, the Crew-13 team, lifted off at 11:10 a.m. EDT Thursday, Oct. 1, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launching from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch followed a delay of about three weeks to repair a fuel leak in the Dragon capsule, The Guardian reported.
The capsule, named Grace, latched onto the Harmony module’s forward port at 7:05 p.m. EDT, 7 hours and 55 minutes after liftoff. NASA said no U.S. spacecraft had made the trip faster in the station’s history.
The previous U.S. mark, 12 hours and 33 minutes, was set in November 2024 by an uncrewed SpaceX cargo Dragon on the CRS-31 resupply mission, according to Space.com. Russia still holds the overall record: the crewed Soyuz MS-17 reached the station 3 hours and 3 minutes after its Oct. 14, 2020, launch, according to Guinness World Records.
SpaceX said the station happened to be in a favorable spot in its orbit when the rocket lifted off. “We got lucky this time,” Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX’s director of NASA science and Dragon programs, said at a post-launch news conference.
The flight also made history for another reason. Mission commander Jessica Watkins, a NASA astronaut and geologist who worked on the Curiosity Mars rover mission, became the first Black woman to command an orbital spaceflight crew. This is her second long-duration stay on the station; her first was in 2022.
Her three crewmates are all making their first spaceflight: NASA astronaut Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Russian cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. The four are expected to spend about six months aboard the station.
Their work plan includes using weightlessness to grow tissue from human stem cells for drug testing and disease research, trying out a largely automated system for growing crops, studying factors tied to abnormal blood flow in microgravity and testing a new device that checks astronaut health in flight, NASA said.
With both Dragon crews on board, the number of people living on the station rose to 11, according to NASA. The other three members of the Expedition 75 team are NASA’s Anil Menon and Russian cosmonauts Dubrov and Anna Kikina.
What’s next
Mission managers plan a final weather review about 48 hours before undocking, NASA said. The departure depends on the readiness of the spacecraft and recovery teams, as well as weather and sea conditions in the splashdown area, so the date could slip again.
Once Crew-12 leaves, seven people will remain on the station under Dubrov’s command. NASA plans to keep the station operating through 2030.
