Four astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are about to take SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Resilience on its shortest mission yet, one that will last less than an hour.
Expedition 64 astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Soichi Noguchi arrived at the ISS aboard the Crew Dragon last November, and early next month they’ll jump inside the spacecraft to change docking ports in preparation for upcoming crew swaps, including their own.
First up, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov are expected to arrive at the ISS on the Russian Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft on April 9 as part of Expedition 65.
They’ll replace NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, who will undock from the station’s Poisk module aboard the Soyuz MS-17 spacecraft on April 16, arriving back on Earth a short while later.
Then, incoming on another Crew Dragon spacecraft on April 23 will be SpaceX Crew-2 members Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur from NASA, Thomas Pesquet from the European Space Agency, and Akihiko Hoshide from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
A few days later, at the end of April, the four Crew-1 astronauts will once again climb inside Crew Dragon Resilience for the trip home after almost six months on the space station.
How to watch
Crew Dragon Resilience will back out from its forward-facing port on the station’s Harmony module on Monday, April 5 at 6:30 a.m. ET, with the crew maneuvering the spacecraft to a docking port on Harmony’s space-facing port about 45 minutes later.
NASA will broadcast the event live online. You can watch it by hitting play on the embedded player at the top of this page. In case NASA adjusts the time of the event, we recommend you check its Twitter feed or check back here for updates.
Interested in taking a look inside the International Space Station? This page offers several ideas on how you can do just that. Also, if you want to learn more about how astronauts live and work on the space station, which orbits Earth at an altitude of around 250 miles, then check out this collection of videos made by former visitors to the ISS.
