SpaceX’s Crew-8 astronauts to depart ISS for trip home on Oct. 13 (Image Credit: Space.com)
SpaceX’s Crew-8 astronaut mission begin the trip home to Earth Sunday morning (Oct. 13), and you can watch the action live.
Crew-8’s Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, is scheduled to undock from the International Space Station (ISS) at 7:05 a.m. EDT (1105 GMT) on Sunday and splash down off the coast of Florida no earlier than 3:38 p.m. EDT (1938 GMT) on Monday (Oct. 14).
You can watch those milestones live via the NASA+ streaming service, and here at Space.com if, as expected, the agency makes its webcasts available.
Crew-8 consists of NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps and Alexander Grebenkin of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos. The quartet launched atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 3 and arrived at the ISS two days later.
Crew-8 was originally supposed to undock on Oct. 7, but Hurricane Milton pushed things back by nearly a week. The powerful storm roiled seas in the mission’s potential splashdown zone, so NASA and SpaceX waited for Milton to pass before greenlighting Crew-8’s homecoming.
Related: Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida with Category 5 strength in new ISS footage (video)
As its name implies, Crew-8 is the eighth operational, long-duration ISS astronaut mission that SpaceX has flown for NASA. Its successor, Crew-9, arrived at the orbiting lab on Sept. 29.
Crew-8 wasn’t the only mission to be affected by Hurricane Milton. For example, NASA and SpaceX had been aiming to launch the agency’s $5 billion Europa Clipper mission on Thursday (Oct. 10) but pushed the attempt back to Sunday as Milton bore down on Florida’s western coast.
Clipper will launch atop a Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, on Florida’s Atlantic coast, no earlier than Monday at 12:06 p.m. EDT (1606 GMT).
