The four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission will return to Earth early Tuesday morning (March 12), and you can watch their homecoming live.
Crew-7’s Dragon capsule, named Endurance, undocked from the International Space Station on Monday (March 11) after the astronauts’ 6.5-month stay on the orbiting laboratory. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will splash down off the coast of Florida on Tuesday around 5:50 a.m. EDT (0950 GMT).
You can watch the reentry and recovery activities here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV. Coverage will begin at 4:30 a.m. EDT (0830 GMT).
Related: SpaceX Crew-7 astronauts undock from the ISS for March 12 return to Earth
Crew-7 consists of NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, Andreas Mogensen of the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Satoshi Furukawa and Konstantin Borisov, a cosmonaut with Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos.
The mission launched to the ISS atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Aug. 26, 2023 and arrived at the orbiting complex a day later. The liftoff kicked off the first spaceflight for Moghbeli and Borisov and the second for Mogensen and Furukawa.
The Crew-7 quartet overlapped briefly with their successors, the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission, which arrived at the ISS last Tuesday (March 5).
As those mission names suggest, SpaceX has now launched eight operational astronaut flights to the ISS for NASA (plus one crewed test flight to the orbiting lab). The agency selected SpaceX for this job in September 2014.
Aerospace giant Boeing got a commercial crew contract back then as well, but has not yet flown an astronaut mission for NASA. That should change soon, however: The first astronaut flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule is scheduled to launch in early May.
That mission, called Crew Flight Test, will send two astronauts to the ISS for a roughly 10-day stay.
Dr. Sarah Adams is a scientist and science communicator who makes complex topics accessible to all. Her articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
