Four-Person Commercial Crew Completes Rotation on the ISS

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission has officially been deemed a success, with the four-person crew splashing down in the Pacific Ocean near California on Saturday, August 9. This completes the agency’s tenth rotation for the Commercial Crew Program, giving private US companies a chance to put their tech into space.

The Commercial Crew Program launched back in 2011, allowing private companies to operate crew transportation services between Earth and the International Space Station. For now, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Crew Dragon has done all the heavy lifting, with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to become a second commercial crew provider once it becomes operational. This addition will take time, since most know how Starliner’s first crewed test ended: with SpaceX coming to the rescue after the scheduled eight-day mission lasted nine months too long.

The program’s 10th rotation ?lifted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on March 14 at precisely 7:03 pm. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carried NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov up to the International Space Station, docking at 12:04 am the next day. McClain and Onishi were the more seasoned parts of the crew, with Ayers and Peskov both making their space debut on the mission.

Since then, the four-person crew has kept busy with hundreds of hours of scientific research, maintenance tasks, and technology tests, studying topics ranging from plant DNA sequences to microgravity’s effects on the human eye structure. In the meantime, the ISS took them more than 62,000,000 miles across 2,368 Earth orbits.

Crew-10 undocked from the ISS at 6:15 pm on August 8 to begin its trip home, splashing down off the coast of California at 11:33 am on the 9th. The four astronauts were quickly pulled from the water by SpaceX recovery teams, carried to shore, and flown to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“Our crew missions are the building blocks for long-duration, human exploration pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said NASA acting Administrator Sean Duffy. “NASA is leading the way by setting a bold vision for exploration where we have a thriving space industry supporting private space stations in low Earth orbit, as well as humans exploring the Moon and Mars.”

FMI: www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew