NASA Launches New Space Station Crew This Week: How to Watch
A crew of four will be heading to the International Space Station in a blaze of glory this week. SpaceX will launch the Crew-10 mission on a Dragon spacecraft with an assist from a Falcon 9 rocket. This is part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program that relies on SpaceX to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.
NASA is targeting liftoff for 4:48 p.m. PT on Wednesday, March 12. The rocket will take off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch complex has a storied history dating back to the Apollo moon program era of the 1960s.
Read more: NASA's 'Stranded' Astronauts Days Away From Coming Home
NASA is known for its detailed coverage of human spaceflight missions. Hard-core space fans can tune into a live video feed of Launch Complex 39A about 6 hours before liftoff through the Kennedy Space Center's newsroom feed on YouTube.
Main launch coverage kicks off at 12:45 p.m. PT on the free NASA Plus streaming service. NASA Plus is available online, through the NASA app and on YouTube.
Once the video livestream wraps up, NASA will switch to an audio-only update stream until Crew-10 nears the ISS for rendezvous and docking on March 13. Arrival coverage is scheduled for 1:15 a.m. PT on Thursday on NASA Plus.
Crew-10 will hit a few milestones along the journey, including docking at 3 a.m. and hatch opening at 4:45 a.m. Astronauts will then engage in a welcome ceremony, during which the new arrivals are greeted by the current ISS crew. It's typically a fun, hug-filled affair.
Crew-10 consists of four people representing three different countries. Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers are NASA astronauts. This will be McClain's second NASA spaceflight and Ayers's first.
Takuya Onishi is with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA. This is his second ISS mission. Kirill Peskov is a cosmonaut with Russia's Roscosmos agency. It's his first visit to the station.
The astronauts will have a full slate of activities ahead of them, including material flammability tests and physiological and psychological studies meant to understand changes to the human body during space missions.
Crew-10 has a bit more riding on it than a typical crew rotation mission. NASA astronauts Sunita "Suni" Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore infamously became long-term ISS residents after riding to the station on a test mission for Boeing's Starliner crew capsule. The crew capsule encountered technical issues and was sent back to Earth without the astronauts.
Williams and Wilmore's ISS stay unexpectedly stretched out for over eight months. Crew-10's arrival means Willams, Wilmore, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will be able to hand off ISS duties to the newcomers and return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon sent up in September. That Dragon arrived with two open seats for the Starliner crew's journey home.
Both astronauts have insisted they don't feel stranded, though that term has been widely applied to them in news stories and social media. They expect to leave the station on March 16. But first, Crew-10 will need to arrive on time.
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