Space Trifecta on Tap Tomorrow Morning

A space trifecta of sorts is coming up tomorrow morning, October 13. At the moment, within an hour-and-a-half NASA’s Crew-8 will depart the International Space Station, SpaceX will launch the Starship IFT-5 test flight and try to catch the Super Heavy booster back at the launch site, and Blue Origin will make a second try at launching a new human-rated New Shepard vehicle. 

If the schedules hold, the three events are at 7:05 am ET, 8:00 am ET, and 8:30 am ET.

[Update October 13, 10:45 am: schedules didn’t hold, in fact. Crew-8’s return was postponed due to weather. Blue Origin’s NS-27 launch scrubbed.  Only SpaceX’s Starship IFT-5 took place as planned.]

[Update, October 12, 9:45 pm ET: NASA has just added two Europa Clipper briefings to the morning’s activities: 8:30 am ET, launch preview; 9:30 am ET, science briefing. See our Calendar for details.]

Crew-8 has been waiting quite some time to come home, but now are scheduled to undock tomorrow morning at 7:05 am ET and splashdown on Monday afternoon.

NASA astronauts Matt Dominick, Mike Barratt and Jeanette Epps and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Grebenkin launched on March 4, 2024 for a nominal crew rotation of about six months. A date for their return wasn’t formally announced other than mid-August, but at one point their replacements on Crew-9 were to launch on August 18. Usually there is about a 5-day handover so Crew-8 would have come home around August 23.

NASA delayed launching their Crew-9 replacements, however, while deciding whether two NASA astronauts who arrived on Boeing’s Starliner in June, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, would come back to Earth in Starliner or remain on the ISS.  If they were to stay, they would need two of the seats on Crew-9 for their trip back to Earth. Ultimately, that’s what NASA decided to do. Crew-9 finally launched with only two of its original four members on September 28.

Crew-8 was getting ready to come home in their SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour after the handover period, but weather intervened. NASA was planning for them to undock on October 8, but Hurricane Milton delayed it until tomorrow morning, October 13. SpaceX Crew Dragons have eight places where they can splash down off the Florida coast in the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico, but the hurricane’s track covered the entire area. SpaceX is moving its Crew and Cargo Dragon splashdowns back to the West Coast next year, which should avoid some of these problems in the future.

SpaceX finally got approval from the FAA this afternoon to proceed with Starship’s fifth Integrated Flight Test, IFT-5, tomorrow morning. The 30-minute launch window opens at 7:00 am CENTRAL Time (8:00 am Eastern). Starship is SpaceX’s new enormous rocket that it plans to use not only to put satellites into Earth orbit, but as the Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis missions and to fulfill Elon Musk’s vision of sending millions of people to Mars.

Musk envisions thousands of Starship launches and, as with Falcon 9, plans to recover and reuse the first stage, Super Heavy. They will try it for the first time tomorrow, bringing Super Heavy back to the launch site after it separates from the Starship second stage and catching it mid-air with so-called “chopsticks” attached to the launch tower. They’ll only attempt it if all conditions are right, but if they do, it will happen 6:56 minutes after liftoff. Starship itself will continue on about three-quarters of the way around the world and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The complete timeline is on SpaceX’s website. SpaceX’s live webcast begins 35 minutes before liftoff.

Blue Origin will try again at 7:30 am CENTRAL Time (8:30 am Eastern) to test launch a new human-rated suborbital New Shepard vehicle. New Shepard-27 (NS-27) is a verification flight of the new system and doesn’t carry any passengers, only scientific experiments and “tens of thousands” of postcards for its Club for the Future.

New Shepard, named after Alan Shepard, the first U.S. astronaut to reach space on a suborbital flight in 1961, can carry experiments and/or six passengers on a roughly 10 minute flight above 100 kilometers (62 miles), the internationally-accepted dividing line between air and space called the Kármán Line. It’s named after Theordore von Kármán who originally calculated the altitude at which aerodynamic lift could no longer support aircraft and Blue Origin decided to call this new crew capsule RSS Kármán Line. “The vehicle features technology upgrades to improve the vehicle’s performance and reusability, an updated livery, and accommodations for payloads on the booster” according to the company.

New Shepard’s updated target launch date is tomorrow, October 13. The #NS27 window opens at 07:30 AM CDT / 12:30 UTC from Launch Site One. Webcast begins 10 minutes prior to launch on https://t.co/bBTJiuEdzG pic.twitter.com/PE2aBLjIrz

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) October 12, 2024

The first attempt on October 7 was delayed for several hours and then a number of holds were called during the countdown. Ultimately they scrubbed it. Blue Origin hasn’t explained why other than to say on X (@blueorigin) that they needed to “troubleshoot a technical issue that would’ve taken us beyond our launch window.”

 

This article has been updated.