NASA and SpaceX have rescheduled the return of the Crew-10 astronauts from the International Space Station after high winds off the Southern California coast forced a 24-hour delay. Dragon Endurance is now set to undock at 6:05 p.m. Eastern Time on Friday, Aug. 8, with splashdown targeted for 11:33 a.m. ET (8:33 a.m. Pacific) on Saturday, Aug. 9, in the Pacific Ocean. The four-person crew—NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov—has spent roughly five months conducting science and maintenance aboard the orbital outpost. The capsule will re-enter the atmosphere about 17 hours after departure; SpaceX’s recovery vessel Shannon has left Long Beach to retrieve the spacecraft and its occupants. The landing will mark the Commercial Crew Program’s first crewed splashdown off California, part of a shift that improves weather reliability and reduces the risk posed by jettisoned hardware during re-entry. Dragon Endurance, flying its fourth mission, will also return time-sensitive research samples to Earth for analysis.
The splashdown of Crew-10 on Dragon Endurance will mark the first West Coast Dragon recovery as part of the Commercial Crew Program. It's the 4th Pacific Ocean recovery of a second-generation Dragon spacecraft following Fram2, CRS-32 and Ax-4. Splashdown off the coast of https://t.co/GeAC606rmZ
Wishing safe travels to Crew-10. Amazing that Dragon remains the Western world's only operational spacecraft capable of getting humans into orbit and back.
The spacecraft will now execute a series of departure burns to move away from the @Space_Station. Dragon will reenter the Earth's atmosphere and splash down in ~17 hours off the coast of California https://t.co/tw4dn1ADFw