NASA has a new launch date for the SpaceX Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station. The move comes after the agency decided to replace a brand new Dragon spacecraft with a previously flown capsule.
NASA astronaut and mission commander Anne McClain will lead two other astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut on the journey to the orbiting outpost, now targeting a liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center no earlier than Wednesday, March 12.
The flight will begin a period of transition onboard the ISS in what is referred to as a direct handover with the current U.S. Orbital Segment (USOS) crew onboard. The transition period of several days allows the incoming crew to familiarize themselves with the current configuration of the space station and understand ongoing operations.
Following this, the Crew Dragon Freedom will undock to bring Crew-9 back to Earth. That quartet consists of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
The undocking date for Crew-9 will be determined by the weather conditions off the coast of Florida. This is will be the final Dragon splashdown off the coast of Florida before recovery operations shift to the West Coast.
NASA decided in late summer to have Williams and Wilmore return as part of Crew-9 after issues with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft prevented them from returning as planned on that spacecraft at the conclusion of the Crew Flight Test mission.
Dragon delays, Dragon shuffles
The launch of the Crew-10 mission has been a moving target for sometime. In an August 2024 blog post, NASA said it was targeting a launch “no earlier than February 2025.”
The mission was also set to introduce what is planned to be SpaceX’s fifth and final Crew Dragon spacecraft. The unnamed capsule has the tail number C213 and has been the main driver behind the shifting timeline.
During a teleconference ahead of the launch of the CRS-26 launch in November 2022, Sarah Walker, SpaceX Director of Dragon Mission Management, said the company was building its fifth Cargo Dragon to “carry us into the future and make sure we can support as many flights as our customers want to fly with us.”
She said the capsule “should be ready in the 2024 timeframe.”
Then, in a January 2024 teleconference ahead of the launch of the Ax-3 private astronaut mission managed by Axiom Space, Benji Reed, the Senior Director of Human Spaceflight Programs at SpaceX, reaffirmed that the C213 Dragon would be ready “later this year.”
During a July 2024 press conference regarding the Crew-9 mission, Spaceflight Now asked about the status of the newest Crew Dragon, since at that point there were no more Dragon missions left unassigned in 2024. Walker said it was “almost done” and “nearing completion.”
Steve Stich, Manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, followed Walker’s comments and confirmed that that Dragon was still at SpaceX’s facilities in Hawthorne, California, “getting assembled in the cleanroom.”
“It’s going through it’s final preparation. Right now, it’s slated for Crew-10 in February,” Stich said. “It’s exciting to have another brand new Dragon spacecraft for Crew-10. That’s the plan right now.”
Image: SpaceX
However, plans began to shift a bit when in December, NASA announced in a blog post the new Crew Dragon’s delivery was taking longer than anticipated and wouldn’t arrive in Florida until “early January” 2025. As a result the agency delayed the launch of Crew-10 to “late March 2025.”
“Fabrication, assembly, testing, and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking endeavor that requires great attention to detail,” Stich said in the post. “We appreciate the hard work by the SpaceX team to expand the Dragon fleet in support of our missions and the flexibility of the station program and expedition crews as we work together to complete the new capsule’s readiness for flight.”
Neither SpaceX nor NASA provided any further detail on what was delaying the Dragon delivery despite requests for comment from news outlets, including Spaceflight Now.
Teams also built our fifth and final Dragon crew spacecraft in Hawthorne, California. Next stop is Florida, where teams will prepare Dragon for its first mission to orbit! 🐉 pic.twitter.com/fElqzvmNvW
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 31, 2024
Then in late January, SpaceX founder Elon Musk suddenly posted on his social media site, X, that President Trump told him to “bring home the two astronauts stranded on the space station as soon as possible.” A similar statement came from the President hours later, in which President Trump wrote that he told Musk to “go get” Wilmore and Williams.
The statements came despite the fact that NASA announced several months earlier that Wilmore and Williams would return to Earth on the Dragon spacecraft used on the Crew-9 mission. That capsule, named Freedom docked with the orbiting outpost in September 2024.
In a statement issued Jan. 29, Cheryl Warner, the News Chief in NASA’s Office of Communications said: “NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions,” Warner wrote.
Most recently on Feb. 11, NASA published a new blog post and stated that it was “accelerating the target launch and return dates” for the Crew-10 and Crew-9 mission respectively. The statement confirmed that it and SpaceX were no longer planning to fly the C213 Dragon and would instead use the Dragon spacecraft, Endurance.
NASA said it would need to first “complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements.”
“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges. Our operational flexibility is enabled by the tremendous partnership between NASA and SpaceX and the agility SpaceX continues to demonstrate to safely meet the agency’s emerging needs,” Stich said. “We greatly benefit from SpaceX’s commercial efforts and their proactive approach in having another spacecraft ready for us to assess and use in support of Crew-10.”
Dragon Endurance was intended to be used by Axiom Space for its forthcoming Ax-4 mission to the ISS. It’s unclear if the C213 Dragon will now make its debut on this private astronaut mission.
Neither NASA nor SpaceX gave specifics on what work is remaining on the new Dragon spacecraft. In the agency’s post it briefly mentioned that the move away from the new capsule gave SpaceX time “to complete the new spacecraft’s interior build and perform final integration activities, while simultaneously launching Crew-10 and returning Crew-9 sooner.”