The weather wasn’t playing nice, so NASA decided to delay the planned splashdown of the SpaceX Crew-1 mission off the coast of Florida until the early morning hours of Sunday.
NASA announced that wind speeds were expected to exceed safety criteria among the seven possible landing zones for a Saturday attempt.
NASA and SpaceX then reset the timing to leave the International Space Station at 8:35 p.m. Saturday for a 2:57 a.m. landing Sunday, and plan to land in the Gulf of Mexico.
The crew will be in place on board the Crew Dragon capsule named “Resilience” by 6:20 p.m. Saturday with NASA TV coverage of their departure beginning at 6 p.m..
Crew-1 passengers, NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and, Shannon Walker plus Soichi Noguchi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, have been on the ISS since last November, and when they do return to Earth, it will mark the completion of the first operational mission of the Commercial Crew Program.
Originally, NASA had aimed for a Wednesday landing, and then Saturday before the latest push. It meant the Crew-1 group would remain on board for one more day with seven others, including the SpaceX Crew-2 mission members, who arrived last Saturday bringing the station population to 11.
At the moment, both the Crew-2 ride, the Dragon capsule named “Endeavour,” and “Resilience” remain attached to the ISS’s Harmony module, the first time two commercial crew craft have been at the station at the same time.
“Endeavour” was the first SpaceX capsule to complete a crewed mission when it splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley as part of test flight Demo-2 last August after more than two months parked at the station. That flight became the first time since 2011 that NASA had launched astronauts into space from U.S. soil, and paved the way for Crew-1, the first of six operational missions for SpaceX.
The other commercial crew partner, Boeing, has yet to complete its uncrewed test flight to the ISS with its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. That mission is slated to fly no earlier than August as the SpaceX flights and cargo missions to the station are making the visiting schedule crowded. Once complete, Boeing will attempt a crewed test that if certified by NASA will lead to both Boeing and SpaceX sharing crew taxi service on six-month rotations.
For now, SpaceX remains the sole provider from the U.S. while Russian Soyuz capsules continue to launch to the station from Kazakhstan.
