WASHINGTON — A Crew Dragon spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station with a new crew, but how long they will stay at the station remains unclear.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 11:43 a.m. Eastern Aug. 1 after a routine countdown. A launch attempt July 31 as scrubbed about a minute before liftoff when clouds over the launch site violated weather rules. Forecasts earlier in the day projected a 90% chance of acceptable launch weather.
The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour, making its sixth flight, separated from the upper stage about nine and a half minutes after liftoff.
The Falcon 9 first stage, on its third flight, landed at Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. That pad, at the former Launch Complex 13, was used for the first Falcon 9 landing in 2015.
Bill Gerstenemaier, vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX, said at a July 30 briefing that this will be the last landing at that pad, as the company begins a transition to landing pads adjacent to its current launch pads. SpaceX will continue to use Landing Zone 2, a landing pad next to Landing Zone 1, for the time being.
Endeavour is scheduled to dock with the ISS at about 3 a.m. Eastern Aug. 2 on the Crew-11 mission for NASA. Crew-11 is commanded by NASA astronaut Zena Cardman with fellow NASA astronaut Mike Fincke as pilot. Kimiya Yui from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Oleg Platonov from the Russian space agency Roscosmos are mission specialists.
The crew had been previously assigned to other missions. Cardman was originally commander of Crew-9 until NASA decided in August 2024 to fly that mission with only two people rather than the original four to free up seats for Starliner Crew Flight Test astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore when NASA decided to bring Starliner back from the ISS uncrewed.
Cardman and fellow NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson were taken off Crew-9 as a result. Cardman was later reassigned to Crew-11, but Wilson has not yet been assigned to a new mission.
Fincke had worked on the commercial crew program for more than a decade, including being assigned for a time to the Crew Flight Test mission. He was later set to fly on Starliner-1, the first operational Starliner flight, before being shifted to Crew-11 early this year. Yui was also assigned to Starliner-1 before being reassigned to Crew-11. Platonov was assigned to Crew-11 after originally preparing to fly on a Soyuz.
“You can tell the crew is excited and ready to go,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the July 30 briefing after he met with the crew. “Mike Fincke was our commercial crew program rep for many years when we were developing Dragon and Starliner and so, for us, it’s a really exciting time to see him go fly.”
Uncertain duration
How long Fincke and the rest of the crew will fly remains to be determined. Crew rotation missions have traditionally been about six months long, but NASA said in May it was considering smaller crew sizes and longer stays on the station as cost-cutting measures, citing “a cumulative multi-year budget reduction” exacerbated by proposed steeper cuts in the fiscal year 2026 budget. Extending missions at the ISS from six to eight months would have the effect of cutting one crew rotation mission every two years.
Stich said NASA and SpaceX were still working on certifying a longer on-orbit stay for Crew Dragon. Those teams, he noted, had first been focused on extending the certification on the number of Crew Dragon flights from 5 to as many as 15, work that was required before clearing Endeavor to launch on Crew-11, its sixth flight.
“We completed all the certification work for Dragon reuse and now we’re starting to get the data in from SpaceX on what it would mean for the vehicle to be in orbit a little longer,” he said, a process he said would take a couple of months.
He said he did not expect there to be any major issues in extending that on-orbit life, noting that the Crew Dragon for the Crew-9 mission spent seven months in space. Areas they plan to check include leak rates, seals and fans. “Once we do that, we can step up to the eight-month mission for whatever the ISS program needs.”
“We’re looking at the potential to extend this current flight, Crew-11,” said Dana Weigel, NASA ISS program manager. “There’s a few more months’ worth of work to do first.” She didn’t disclose a specific schedule or deadline for making a decision to extend the mission.
She added that NASA has no plans to extend the on-orbit life of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner to eight months. “We’ve got enough experience with Dragon that we’re at a good point in time to do that with that vehicle.”