It was a good day to have a good day here in Florida, and that’s exactly what NASA, SpaceX and Crew 10 had today at Kennedy Space Center.
Falcon 9 lifted off, carrying three astronauts and one cosmonaut toward orbit and the International Space Station just as the sun was starting to set in the west. Some seven and a half minutes later, SpaceX booster B1090 completed its duty for the day by landing at LZ-1 in Cape Canaveral, 8.8 miles south of LC-39A.
Some days you’re the bug, other days you’re the windshield.
The scheduled Wednesday launch of the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station was scrubbed last night with a little more than forty six minutes left on the countdown clock. The delay stemmed from a malfunction in the hydraulic system of a ground support clamp arm attached to the Falcon 9 rocket, located at SpaceX’s Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The crew—comprising NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov—departed the Dragon spacecraft following the cancellation and will remain in Florida for the time being awaiting a new launch window.
The earliest rescheduled launch window is now set for no sooner than Friday, March 14th at 7:06 PM ET in an instantaneous window. That date is dependant on remediations of the hydraulic issue at the launch pad. At this time, the Falcon 9 vehicle itself and the Crew Dragon the astronauts will fly aboard is in good condition.
Weatherwise, the U.S. Space Force 45th Weather Squadron has not released a new Launch Mission Execution forecast for tomorrow. General forecasts for the Cape are showing a minimal chance of rain with easterly winds between 5-10 MPH with gusts not being a great deal higher than that. Keep in mind that the general forecasts do not consider launch criteria and cover much larger area than the ascent corridor at and above LC-39A, so the 45th may have a different outlook on the probability of acceptable conditions.
Another consideration will be winds and seas along the ascent corridor. That must be within acceptable conditions. Reliable forecasts for winds at the altitudes Falcon 9 will be at are not available at this time. Bottom line: wait for the 45th Weather Squadron’s forecast to draw any conclusions about weather conditions for the launch.
Should the Crew-10 mission proceed on March 14, the preceding Crew-9 team—consisting of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, alongside Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov—would undock from the space station NET Tuesday, March 18. That timeline remains contingent on suitable weather conditions at the designated splashdown zones off Florida’s coast and may change over the next few days.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams completed a 6.5 hour EVA outside the International Space Station today. During the event, Suni Williams became the record-holder for the most accumulated time by a woman for spacewalks. Williams now has 62 hours, 6 minutes of total spacewalk time. She is fourth on NASA’s all-time list as well.
The two astronauts are, of course, part of the current political kerfuffle surrounding their stay on ISS, when they were assigned to ISS Expedition 71/72 after it was decided to return their Starliner capsule home uncrewed thanks to technical concerns about the Boeing spacecraft.
During their pair’s EVA, Williams surpassed former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson’s total spacewalking time of 60 hours and 21 minutes.
The former record holder posted her congratulations today on X.com:
While outside ISS, the Williams and Wilmore performed work to remove an antenna assembly from the station’s truss, collected samples of surface material for analysis from the Destiny laboratory and the Quest airlock to see whether microorganisms exist on the exterior of ISS, and they also prepared a spare elbow joint for the Canadarm2 robotic arm.
The pair are set to return to Earth aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon in late March or early April. Currently, Crew 10 is slated to launch on March 24th, and after a handoff period Crew 9 will return to Earth with Williams and Wilmore aboard a Crew Dragon.
After they joined Expedition’s 71/72 crew, the plan was to bring them home in February, but delays in SpaceX’s completing and qualifying a new Dragon capsule that will be used for the mission forced NASA to further extend the length of their unexpected stay in space.
NASA announced the members of the Crew-10 mission to ISS today. They slated to fly to ISS no earlier than February of next year aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon and Falcon 9.
NASA astronauts Commander Anne McClain and Pilot Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Mission Specialist Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mission Specialist Kirill Peskov will join astronauts at the orbiting laboratory next year.
This will be McClain’s second spaceflight. She was selected as an astronaut in 2013 and is a colonel in the U.S. Army. McClain earned her bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and holds master’s degrees in Aerospace Engineering, International Security, and Strategic Studies.
The Spokane, Washington, native is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Maryland. She has more than 2,300 flight hours in 24 rotary and fixed-wing aircraft, including more than 800 in combat, and was a member of the U.S. Women’s National Rugby Team.
On her first spaceflight, McClain spent 204 days as a flight engineer during Expeditions 58 and 59 and was the lead on two spacewalks, totaling 13 hours and 8 minutes. Since then, she has served in various roles, including branch chief and space station assistant to the chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office.
Ayers is a major in the U.S. Air Force and the first member of NASA’s 2021 astronaut class set to fly to space. The Colorado native graduated from the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a minor in Russian.
She later earned a master’s in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University in Houston. Ayers served as an instructor pilot and mission commander in the T-38 ADAIR and F-22 Raptor, leading multinational and multiservice missions worldwide. She has more than 1,400 total flight hours, including more than 200 in combat.
Ayers is also a former athlete, and was a member of the academy’s varsity volleyball team.
The Crew 10 flight will be Onishi’s second trip to the International Space Station. After being selected by JAXA in 2009, he flew as a flight engineer for Expeditions 48 and 49 became the first Japanese astronaut to robotically capture the Cygnus spacecraft. He has spent 113 days in space. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Tokyo and was a pilot for All Nippon Airways, flying more than 3,700 flight hours in the Boeing 767.
He also constructed a new experimental environment aboard Kibo, the station’s Japanese experiment module. Since his spaceflight, Onishi became certified as a JAXA flight director, leading the team responsible for operating Kibo from JAXA Mission Control in Tsukuba, Japan.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission also will be Peskov’s first spaceflight. Before his selection as a cosmonaut in 2018, he earned a degree in Engineering from the Ulyanovsk Civil Aviation School and was a co-pilot on the Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft for airlines Nordwind and Ikar. Assigned as a test-cosmonaut in 2020, he has additional experience in skydiving, zero-gravity training, scuba diving, and wilderness survival.
Peskov will be flying aboard a Crew Dragon as part of the seat exchange program finalized in 2022 between the United States and Russia.
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