Crew-11 on The Way to ISS

Crew-11 had better luck today. Yesterday their launch was scrubbed one minute before liftoff as storm clouds arrived at just the wrong moment. Today looked like it was going to be a repeat, but they were able to get off in time and are on their way to the International Space Station arriving at 3:00 am ET tomorrow.

Liftoff was at 11:43 am ET from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A.

Liftoff of Crew-11! pic.twitter.com/wDSMvDyF5i

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 1, 2025

Crew-11’s spacecraft, Endeavour, is the same one that took Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on their historic Demo-2 test flight to the ISS five years ago, the first time American astronauts launched from American soil since the end of the space shuttle program nine years earlier. Endeavour will dock tomorrow morning on the anniversary of the day Bob and Doug returned to Earth.

SpaceX’s five Crew Dragon spacecraft — Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance, Freedom, and Grace — were initially certified for five flights each, but NASA and SpaceX have begun a painstaking process to recertify them for up to 15 flights each. Endeavour is the oldest and the first to be recertified, but so far for only six flights.

Aboard Endeavour today are Commander Zena Cardman (NASA), Pilot Mike Fincke (NASA), and Mission Specialists Kimiya Yui (JAXA) and Oleg Platonov (Roscosmos). This is Fincke’s fourth spaceflight (once on the space shuttle, twice on Russia’s Soyuz) and Yui’s second (his first also was on Soyuz). Cardman and Platonov are rookies. All are flying on Crew Dragon for the first time.

Nominally they will spend six months aboard the ISS conducting scientific experiments and other tasks, but it could be longer. In addition to recertifying how many times Crew Dragons can fly, NASA is working on extending the length of time Dragons are certified to remain in space. The current limit is 210 days, but due to budget constraints NASA wants crews to be able to remain onboard longer in order to reduce the number of launches per year.  If they complete the work in the next few months, Crew-11 could remain for eight months instead of six.

The ISS will celebrate 25 years of permanent occupancy on November 2 when Crew-11 is aboard.

NASA and the other ISS partners — Russia,  Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries working through the European Space Agency — plan to deorbit the space station in late 2030.

The ISS is showing its age. Efforts to plug persistent air leaks in a transfer tunnel at the end of the Russian segment have been ongoing since 2019.  Roscosmos and NASA thought they’d finally succeeded last month, but Roscosmos’s Sergei Krikalev said at a July 30 pre-launch briefing that another leak was detected. Krikalev is Russia’s most experienced cosmonaut and was a member of the first crew to occupy ISS in 2000. Currently he is Deputy Director General for Manned and Automated Complexes. He said they “significantly reduced the leak rate,” but a small leak has reappeared and scientists and engineers from Russia and the U.S. continue to investigate the root cause.

NASA ISS Program Manager Dana Weigel said at today’s post-launch press conference that the plan is to begin the two-year process of deorbiting the ISS in 2028.  It will drift down gradually on its own beginning in mid-2028. In mid-2029, the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle (USDV) being built by SpaceX will arrive. Engines on the Russian segment will be used for attitude control while the USDV will do the thrusting needed to direct the 420 Metric Ton facility into an uninhabited region of the Pacific Ocean.  “It’s very much an integrated plan and integrated solution” Weigel said, and Russia is already building up its fuel reserves on the ISS to be ready.

Russian engines on the Zvezda module and Progress cargo ships have been used throughout the station’s lifetime to reboost the ISS to compensate for atmospheric drag and for debris collision avoidance maneuvers.  Recent versions of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft can do a small amount of reboost and the next SpaceX Cargo Dragon, SpX-33, will have a “boost trunk” that also can perform that task, but reboost primarily is a Russian function. The U.S. and Russian segments are interdependent. The U.S. segment provides electrical power for both.

Russian space agency Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov was at Kennedy Space Center yesterday for the first launch attempt and met with NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy. A NASA press release indicated he would participate in today’s briefing, but he was not there. [Update, August 2: NASA tells SpacePolicyOnline today that the press release was in error. Bakanov left KSC on July 31.]  Ken Bowersox, a former NASA astronaut and now Associate Administrator for Space Operations, was asked what Bakanov and Duffy talked about.  Bowersox declined to get into details, but said it was “really positive.”

“At a high level let me just say it was really positive. The two of them, I thought, had a great connection. And I think they started the very beginning of what can be a good relationship. And as we work with all of our partners, relationships are key. The way we talk to each other, the ability to call each other on the phone and ask questions, or ask for a potential change, and the other partner’s position, is really, really important. And so it was really exciting for me to see the potential for them to work well together.

“In a few more specifics, they talked a little bit about how it would be good if we could support each other in the future with the capability and standards to be able to rescue each other’s crews, to be in a position to do that in the future someday. And related that back to Apollo-Soyuz. And they talked about the things that we might be able to do in the future together if the situation allows us to continue that type of effort.” — Ken  Bowersox

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, ASTP, was two weeks ago. An American Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz in July 1975 during the height of the Cold War as a demonstration of the possibility of each side rescuing the other’s crew in an emergency.  Hopes that it would usher in a new era of U.S.-Soviet space cooperation experienced some ups and downs, but after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to Russia joining the ISS program in 1993.

U.S.-Russian relations have been strained since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and invaded the rest of Ukraine in 2022. The Duffy-Bakanov meeting was the first between the heads of the two space agencies since 2018 although routine operations among all the ISS partners have remained steadfast.