NASA announces March 12, 2025 as new launch date for next crew to ISS
NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.
The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.
Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.
The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.
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NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.
The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.
Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.
The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either. IMPORTANT! If you donate enough to get a book, please email me separately to tell me which book you want and the address to mail it to.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Hi Bob,
Everything in your post is true, of course, but it is worth reiterating (in defense of SpaceX!) that SpaceX was not originally planning to launch its new Dragon, C213, until Crew-11 in August 2025. Starliner’s problems caused Spacex to pick up the Crew-10 mission with C213, and they lost 6 months of preparation time.
From what I’ve heard, the C213 staff burned the midnight oil to speed things up, but they could only do so much, it seems. But Axiom-4 is not as urgent, time-wise, as Crew-10.
Richard M: I had not known SpaceX’s original plans, which leaves one question: Who made the decision to push that new capsule’s debut up six months? Was it SpaceX? Or was it NASA?
It seems to me they could have done the Endurance swap months ago instead of now. That would have allowed the crew that includes the Starliner astronauts to have come home in February, as originally planned.
The sentence that I will nitpick.
““The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it,””
Let’s not forget the Boeing failure that put them in this position. (The decision not to trust the capsule was the correct one as evidence by the holes burned into the capsule on reentry.) it was fortunate that an alternative means of transportation became available at all.
Had the shoe bin on the other foot, and no dragon capsule available… How many years would it take to get a Boeing one ready to go? It wasn’t that long ago that we would be asking (begging) for a ride from the Russians!
In the few years, they’ll be so many other alternatives that it’s just gonna be a matter of booking a flight to your destination…. We will be reminiscing about this in the future, how at one time we had astronauts seemingly “stranded” in space… just like the last episode of planet of the apes? there will be space operas performed on this scenario.
Hell Bob,
I don’t know. It may have been a mutual decision that unfolded in conversations between Steve Stick and SpaceX. But I am just speculating.
But…yes, it seems like it would have been safer to just go with Endurance from the outset.
I would think it was NASA that wanted a brand new capsule.
They tend to want new equipment and Elon might have told them Space X had a good chance of getting the new one done.
Elon should have got an older one ready as fast as possible along with finishing the new one.
Having enough capsules to always have one ready in as short as possible time is always a good idea.
My apologies, I thought I was the first to comment but once I posted, two other comments showed up above mine that weren’t there before, discussing the same thought.
Even though I use a different search engine each time I log on to get a fresh updated webpage, sometimes current comments are either missing, or it shows more comments posted than there are actually there when you click on it. A new form of shadow banning? or AI interference? I have friends telling me they’re having problems on other unrelated websites. I must shut off my phone, after deleting all the cookies/history to get things back to normal more frequently. Then I delete the cookies again just to make sure the forever cookies don’t reload? I don’t think it works either but I do it anyway.
It’s worth remembering that Starliner CFT was not the first time that a crew faced a serious scenario of requiring a possible rescue on a space station. Setting aside rumors of various Soviet incidents, the mission I am thinking of was Skylab 3 in 1973. To quote Wikipedia:
“A rescue mission was considered when the Skylab 3 Command/Service Module (CSM) developed problems in its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters while docked to the station. On the ground, space vehicles were assembled to fly rescue missions in support of both Skylab 3 and Skylab 4. ”
One advantage of the early cancellation of the Apollo program was that NASA had a lot of completed, unused Apollo hardware sitting around, still available. They quickly modified one of the spare Apollo command modules, CSM 119, to have five seats, with the plan to fly two astronauts. Vance Brand and Don Lind, up on it to dock with Skylab and bring back the “stranded” Skylab 3 crew. In fact, a complete stack of a Saturn IB rocket, AS 208, with CSM 119 atop it, was assembled on LC-39B, ready to launch.
But it proved to be unnecessary: “While many within NASA believed that the rescue mission would occur, within hours of the failure of the second quad the agency canceled the rescue mission. Beyond NASA’s conclusion that the failed quads would not disable the Skylab 3 CSM and the SPS fuel was uncontaminated, Brand and Lind had already shown during their training as backup Skylab crewmen that a reentry with failed quads was safe. They also devised a method to deorbit with the command module’s attitude control system. Later joking that they were “very efficient but perfectly stupid, because we have literally worked ourselves out of the mission”, Brand and Lind continued to train for a rescue mission, as well as for their backup roles, but the Skylab 3 crew was able to complete its full 59-day mission on the station and safely return to Earth using the two functional RCS thruster quads, using the SPS engine once instead of twice as precaution.”
As a postscript, there were also plans for a short 20-day “Skylab 5” flight, flying in April 1974, that would have used this backup CSM, with a likely crew consisting of Brand, Lind, and Skylab backup Science Pilot William B. Lenoir. But NASA ended up being able to do most of the research that Skylab 5 would have done by extending Skylab 4, and anyway, budgets were very tight and every spare dollar was being poured into Shuttle development, so CSM 119 and AS 209 ended up as museum and rocket garden exhibits instead.
Of course, in 1973, NASA had only one architecture for transporting crew to and from orbit; there wasn’t a second, more reliable crew vehicle to fall back on. In 2024, however, NASA actually did have such an option — and as we know, it used it.
Thank you for the history that I was unaware of. (11 years old) I was thinking of the nailbiter Apollo 13 that with fancy footwork, turned out OK.