4 outgoing International Space Station fliers undock, head for Saturday splashdown
Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and cosmonaut Kirill Peskov bid their station crewmates farewell, floated into the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endurance, strapped in and undocked from the lab's forward port at 6:15 p.m. Eastern Time.
If all goes well, the capsule will plunge back into the discernible atmosphere Saturday morning, splashing down off the southern California coast at 11:33 a.m. EDT.
"We really want to leave with gratitude for the absolute privilege of getting to live and work aboard this amazing International Space Station," McClain said in a departure ceremony Tuesday. "All of us are keenly aware that we may never get to do this again.
"We've been very pensive over the last days of understanding what we have all got to be a part of. We know that there are some tumultuous times on Earth ... and we want this mission, our mission, to be a reminder of what people can do when we work together, when we explore together."
Station commander Onishi then handed a symbolic key to the lab complex — along with command of the ISS — to cosmonaut Sergey Ryzhikov.
"I would like to note that our Expedition 73 took place on an anniversary year," Ryzhikov said. "We together celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first joint international spaceflight, Apollo-Soyuz, and the first handshake in space.
"We are going to celebrate the 25th anniversary of International Space Station flight in manned mode (in November)," he continued. "History shows that on our beautiful planet, people unfortunately cannot understand each other. But in space we can cooperate effectively. So thank you everybody."
Crew 10's departure comes six days after the arrival of their replacements, Crew 11 commander Zena Cardman, pilot Mike Fincke, Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. They were launched Aug. 1 aboard the Crew Dragon Endeavour.
Since then, the outgoing crew, along with Ryzhikov, cosmonaut Alexey Zubritsky and NASA crewmate Jonny Kim, has been briefing the replacements on the intricacies of station operations, getting them up to speed as quickly as possible.
As it turned out, Crew 10 enjoyed a bit of additional time for a "handover" thanks to high winds in the splashdown zone that ruled out a planned Wednesday undocking.
The undocking Friday set up a 17.5-hour trip back to Earth. The Crew Dragon's forward-facing Draco thrusters will fire for nearly 10 minutes at 10:39 a.m. EDT Saturday, slowing the capsule enough to drop the far side of the ship's orbit into the atmosphere.
Following a southwest-to-northeast trajectory, Endurance is expected to splash down off Southern California at 11:33 a.m., closing out a 147-day, 16-hour, 29-minute mission spanning 2,368 orbits and 62.8 million miles since it launched on March 14.
Crew 10 is the first NASA-sponsored crew to land in the Pacific Ocean. All previous NASA Crew Dragon flights ended with splashdowns off the Florida Gulf coast or the Atlantic Ocean.
But SpaceX recently decided to change landing locales to make sure any debris from the Crew Dragon's discarded trunk section splashes harmlessly into the Pacific, well away from any populated areas.
Two commercial Crew Dragon flights landed in the Pacific earlier this year to pave the way for Crew 10. As with those earlier flights, SpaceX recovery crews will be standing by near the landing site to retrieve the capsule and the astronauts.
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