SpaceX’s Crew-10 astronaut mission will arrive at the International Space Station tonight (March 15), and you can watch the action live.
Crew-10 launched on Friday evening (March 14) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, sending four astronauts from three different nations toward the orbiting lab.
That chase will end today: Crew-10’s Crew Dragon capsule, named Endurance, is scheduled to dock with the station’s Harmony module around 11:30 p.m. EDT (0330 GMT on March 16). You can watch the arrival live via NASA, starting at 9:45 p.m. EDT (0145 GMT). Space.com will carry the feed as well, if the agency makes it available.
There will be other milestones to watch after docking as well. The hatches between Endurance and the International Space Station (ISS) are expected to open around 1:05 a.m. EDT (0505 GMT) on Sunday (March 16), and the astronauts already living on the orbiting lab will hold a welcome ceremony for the new arrivals about 30 minutes later.
Those new arrivals are NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi of JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and Kirill Peskov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
McClain is the Crew-10 commander. Ayers is the pilot, and Onishi and Peskov are mission specialists. The quartet will stay aboard the ISS for about six months, the usual duration for crew rotations.
Related: Meet the astronauts of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission
The Crew-10 astronauts will relieve four folks who have been living on the ISS for a while now — NASA’s Nick Hague, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore and Roscosmos’ Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Hague and Gorbunov arrived at the station in late September, on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. Williams and Wilmore have been in orbit since early June, when they launched on the first crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
Starliner’s mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but the capsule suffered thruster problems and was eventually brought home uncrewed in early September. NASA retasked Williams and Wilmore to a long-term ISS mission and took two astronauts off the Crew-9 launch to accommodate them on the way home.
Hague, Williams, Wilmroe and Gorbunov will come back to Earth in the Crew-9 Dragon no earlier than Wednesday (March 19), NASA officials said after the Crew-10 launch.
