The four astronauts from SpaceX’s Crew-7 mission are scheduled to return to Earth early Tuesday morning (March 12), and you can watch their return live.
Crew 7’s Dragon capsule, named Endurance, undocked from the International Space Station on Monday (March 11) after the astronauts spent six and a half months in the orbiting laboratory. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft is scheduled to splash down off the coast of Florida around 5:50 a.m. EDT (9:50 p.m. Japan time) on Tuesday.
Watch coverage of atmospheric reentry and recovery operations on Space.com, brought to you by NASA TV. Coverage will begin at 4:30 a.m. EDT (8:30 p.m. Japan time).
Related: SpaceX Crew-7 astronauts leave the ISS in preparation for return to Earth on March 12th
Crew-7 is made up of NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghberg, European Space Agency’s Andreas Mogensen, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Satoshi Furukawa, and Russian space agency Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov.
The mission launched to the ISS on August 26, 2023, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and arrived at the orbital complex one day later. The launch marked the first spaceflight for Moghbeli and Borisov, and the second for Mogensen and Furukawa.
The Crew-7 quartet briefly overlapped with its successor, the four astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission, which arrived at the ISS last Tuesday (March 5).
As these mission names suggest, SpaceX currently conducts eight flight flights to the ISS for NASA (plus one crewed test flight to an orbiting laboratory). The agency selected SpaceX for the job in September 2014.
Aerospace giant Boeing also had a commercial crew contract at the time, but had not yet flown on a NASA astronaut mission. But that should change soon. The first astronaut flight on Boeing’s Starliner capsule is scheduled to launch in early May.
The mission, called the Crew Flight Test, will send two astronauts to the ISS, where they will stay for about 10 days.
