by Allen Cone
Washington DC (UPI) Aug 8, 2025
Members of the Crew-10 on Friday night undocked from the International Space Station aboard the Dragon 9 spacecraft.
The undocking was scheduled for 6:05 p.m. EDT and it was confirmed at 6:30 p.m. The hatch was closed at 4:20 p.m.
Dragon then executed a series of departure burns as the spacecraft moved away from the ISS, which orbits the Earth approximately 250 miles away.
Dragon will enter the Earth's atmosphere with splashdown targeted for 8:33 a.m. PDT Saturday off the Southern California coast.
The movement can be tracked on SpaceX's website.
This will be the first time a crewed mission will splash down in the Pacific Ocean after SpaceX's recovery ship Shannon moved in December from Port Canaveral, Fla., to near Long Beach.
Afterward, the four Crew-10 members will be flown to Houston.
Crew-10 launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on March 14 from the Kennedy Space Center's Pad 39A and arrived at the ISS two days later. They relieved crew members, who included two astronauts, Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Suni Willoiams from Boeing's beleaguered Starliner spacecraft.
The undocking of the Dragon, called Endurance, was scheduled for Thursday afternoon, but high winds in the splashdown area delayed it.
Those aboard the NASA/Space X Crew-10 are NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. Science samples will return with them.
"Crew-10 has had the absolute privilege of working here for the last four months, and we have so much gratitude for all of the ground teams that showed up every day to make this possible," McClain said during a farewell ceremony on Tuesday on the space station.
"We truly are very humbled to represent humanity, and we hope that we can be a reminder to others of the goodness of humanity and what we really can accomplish when we work together," she added.
It was Endurance's fourth mission dating to 2021.
SpaceX's Crew-11 members Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui and Oleg Platonov docked at the space station Saturday.
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