Space Station Crew 10 Mission Launches Wednesday Evening

The ISS Crew 10 mission is preparing to launch Wednesday in the early evening, 7:48 PM EDT, from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral.  Lately the mission has been most often mentioned as replacing Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams' and enabling their ride home from their eight-day turned eight-month Starliner mission.  That's not quite right; they won't return home in the Dragon capsule Endurance launching Crew 10; they're returning with the other two astronauts from the Crew-9 Dragon Freedom launched last summer.

The Dragon spacecraft supporting this mission previously flew NASA’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 missions to and from the space station. Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage will land on Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  

The crew consists of NASA astronauts Crew-10 Commander Anne McClain, Pilot Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.  For an on-time launch, the Crew-10 foursome would dock to the orbital outpost at 6 a.m. on Thursday and begin their long-duration mission as Expedition 72 flight engineers. 

Image assembled from individual images on the SpaceX mission page. Image credit: NASA

NASA does these crew swaps roughly every six months, and one of the routine steps is that the new Expedition crew overlaps with the old crew for around a week to make a smoother fransfer to the new expedition.  We'll know more about when and where the reentry will take place over the coming week.  The NASA ISS Blog gives more info on exactly what the crew has been doing.