WASHINGTON — A Crew Dragon spacecraft returned four people from the International Space Station Aug. 9 as NASA weighs how long the next crew will stay there.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance splashed down off the coast of San Diego, California, at 11:33 a.m. Eastern. The spacecraft undocked from the station at 6:15 p.m. Eastern Aug. 8.
The splashdown appeared to be normal, although the NASA webcast lost the capsule during its final descent through a cloud layer, at one point instead following the jettisoned drogue chutes rather than the capsule. An audio issue garbled transmissions from the Dragon on the NASA webcast.
The splashdown concluded the Crew-10 mission, returning NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese space agency JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. They launched to the ISS March 14.
At a post-splashdown briefing, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, called the Crew Dragon’s return “very nominal.” The only issue, he said, was the failure of one of two redundant pumps on the spacecraft after splashdown that pump water into a bag to stabilize the capsule in the water. The failure did not affect recovery operations and the cause is being investigated.
This also marked the first NASA commercial crew splashdown off the California coast, although SpaceX performed two recoveries of private astronaut missions earlier this year there. NASA and SpaceX agreed last year to move the splashdowns from Florida to enable safe deorbiting of the Dragon’s trunk section after debris from several trunks survived reentry.
State of the station
The Crew-10 mission returned just a few months before NASA and other space station partners celebrate the 25th anniversary of a continuous human presence on the ISS. It is also only about five years before the ISS is scheduled to be retired in favor of commercial space stations.
The age of the station has become a topic of discussion, as well as what NASA called a “cumulative multi-year budget reduction” that has reduced the number of cargo flights to the station. That has also led NASA to consider reducing the size of the station’s crew and extending crew rotation missions from six months to eight.
In a July 25 media event while still on the station, McClain played down any concerns about ISS safety and operations.
“There’s always some wear and tear,” she said. “But the current state of the space station is that it is in a phenomenal condition to continue this mission. We all feel very safe being here. The teams on the ground are continuing with their A+ work as usual.”
The station is hosting hundreds of experiments, she noted. “The space station is more than ready to do that for the next six, seven years. We’re excited to see that because as we shift our priorities towards Artemis and deep space exploration, there’s a lot of questions we have lots to answer, and its absolutely critical that space station is a platform that we continue using as a proving ground for those missions.”
One example of those ISS has been a long-running, but small, air leak in a Russian module of the station. Recent repair work by Russian cosmonauts initially showed promise, but Roscosmos officials said July 30 that the leak persisted.
“The station is older and this is one of those problems that creep up when you have an older space station. We feel very safe,” McClain said, deferring details about the air leak to ground personnel.
Crew-11 status
The members of Crew-10 were replaced on the ISS by the Crew-11 mission, which launched to the station Aug. 1 and docked the next day. It includes NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.
At the time Crew-11 launched, NASA officials said they were uncertain they would remain on the station. While crew increments have been about six months — Crew-10 was slightly shorter, at five months — NASA is exploring extending those missions to eight months to deal with reduced station budgets.
“We have, maybe, a couple months’ worth of work to do to look at all the data” about Crew Dragon to determine if its on-orbit life can be certified to eight months, Stich said at the post-splashdown briefing. Once that is done, he said his office would work with the ISS program to determine whether to extend Crew-11.
“Right now, we’re looking already at a potential manifest as if we could extend the flight,” he added.
Dina Contella, deputy manager of the ISS program at NASA, said the program will look to see when a Crew-11 return can fit into the schedule of other missions to and from the station. An eight-month stay for Crew-11 would have the mission ending by early April. That means working around a swap of Russian Progress cargo vehicles planned for March as well as a Russian spacewalk.
Neither Stich nor Contella gave a firm date for when NASA needs to decide on how long Crew-11 will remain at the station. “Those decisions can be made a little bit later,” Contella said.
NASA has also yet to announce the crew for the Crew-12 mission that will follow Crew-11 some time early next year. Stich said to expect an announcement in the “next couple of months” on Crew-12 assignments, adding it was not linked to the decision on duration for Crew-11.
The Crew-10 astronauts, meanwhile, will begin their recovery after five months in space, including some rest after a hectic mission. “When I get back home, I’m kind of looking forward to doing nothing for a couple of days,” McClain said at the July 25 event.