SpaceX’s reusable spacecraft Crew Dragon has launched to the International Space Station (ISS) from Cape Canaveral in Florida, NASA reports. The launch of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle with the ship was carried out on 14 March at 19:03 US East Coast time (1:03 15 March Kiev time). About 10 minutes later, the ship separated from the second stage of the rocket and began an autonomous flight to the ISS. Docking will take place about 14 hours after liftoff.
The Crew-10 crew included NASA astronauts Anne McClain (commander), Nicole Ayers, Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi.
A few days after the arrival of Crew-10, the Crew-9 crew, which includes NASA astronauts Nick Geig, Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, is scheduled to return to Earth. They will return on the Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft, which has been on the ISS since September 2024.
If weather conditions in the area of the ship’s drive off the coast of Florida allow, the astronauts will return as early as 19 March.
NASA astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore, who will return to Earth, have been on the ISS since June 2024. They arrived at the station on Boeing’s US Starliner spacecraft. The astronauts were scheduled to spend just over a week on the space station, but due to malfunctions on the Starliner, their return was postponed. The Starliner travelled to Earth without a crew, and the astronauts’ mission lasted more than nine months.
The long stay in space allowed Suna Williams to break the record for the total time in outer space (outside the station) among women – 62 hours and six minutes, notes ABC News.