NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 successfully launches to ISS to replace Spokane astronaut Anne McClain and company

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Aug. 1—Within a week, Spokane's own astronaut will be back on Earth.
NASA's SpaceX Crew-11 is on its way to relieve U.S. Army Colonel Anne McClain and company aboard the International Space Station after successfully launching from Cape Canaveral Friday at 8:43 a.m. Pacific Time.
The arrival of the SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying Crew-11, which is composed of NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Olege Platonov, is expected to occur around midnight Saturday morning. It will be mission commander Cardman and mission specialist Platonov's first spaceflights, while pilot Fincke and specialist Yui are beginning their fourth and second stint aboard the station.
"I have no emotions but joy right now," Cardman said shortly after the Dragon capsule achieved orbit. "That was absolutely transcendent, the ride of a lifetime."
McClain and her fellow members of Crew-10 will return after a brief handover period with their staffing replacements aboard the orbiting laboratory.
"They'll join the crew that's in orbit, they'll hand over there, they'll learn as much as they can about the station from that crew and then we'll switch our emphasis to bringing home Crew-10 sometime, we hope, next week," said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate. "If weather and hardware cooperate."
McClain shared via social media Wednesday that she and fellow NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov are hard at work preparing for their successors' arrival. They are currently expected to undock from the space station no sooner than 11 a.m. Wednesday, splashing down off the coast of California just over six hours later, McClain said.
On Thursday, McClain took to social media again to share one of the last photos she'll snap aboard the space station: an image of the Northern Lights dancing just above the curve of the Earth as seen from the station's cupola.
"As we get close to leaving the International Space Station, I find myself wanting to savor every moment and every view," McClain wrote. "None of us are guaranteed to get to do this again, and every minute spent in space is a special one."
Steve Stich, manager of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, said in a Friday news conference that the Crew-11 launch was initially delayed from Thursday due to inopportune weather but went off without issue, shortly before the Florida weather almost necessitated another delay. The flight is the 12th human space flight and 11th space station crew change to come out of NASA's commercial crew program, in which the space agency partners with corporations in order to make the staffing of the space lab safer and more reliable and cost efficient.
"We really got very lucky today, I would say," Stich said. "I was just looking at a shot on my phone, a view from Falcon 9 looking down, and you can see the launch pad was kind of in a little, it was almost like a horseshoe of clouds. The launch pad was in the center of that horseshoe."
Sarah Walker, director of Dragon Mission Management for SpaceX, added that while it was disappointing to scrub Thursday's launch with less than a minute to take off, safety is always the number one priority.
"Today was a better day to fly, although, just barely," Walker said. "I want to say that that horseshoe of clouds closed within a couple of minutes of T-Zero."
Once aboard, Crew-11 will continue the research conducted aboard the station for decades. The International Space Station has been staffed by astronauts and cosmonauts since 2000, with visits from more than 280 people hailing from 26 countries. Breakthroughs and findings aboard the laboratory have helped make major advancements in space travel, medicine and natural disaster preparedness, just to name a few.
Dana Weigel, manager of NASA's ISS program, said Crew-11 will have the opportunity to partake in some particularly "key" research as the agency prepares for the Artemis program, and possible Mars missions. Those include studies on the astronauts themselves that seek to protect human health during longer missions and simulated lunar lands in a region that mimic the Moon's South Pole.
"The goal of this study is to really understand how the disorienting effects of microgravity impact piloting and landing, and then we'll take that feedback and we'll put that into our planning for tools and aids for the crew," Weigel said.
The Artemis program seeks to return American astronauts to the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions of the 1960s and early '70s, and McClain was among those in the running for one of the program's missions prior to her naming to Crew-10. The 46-year-old now has two spaceflights under her belt totaling more than 340 days and counting, making her an attractive option for future Artemis missions.
Cardman and the rest of Crew-11's mission is months longer than Crew-10's stay, and they will be among a handful of people to be aboard the station in November as NASA and its commercial and international partners celebrate 25 years of continual human occupancy. Weigel thanked all of those who have made reaching the notable milestone possible, and shared that the agency is working through a variety of ideas to commemorate the "amazing accomplishment" in the months to come.
"We have no shortage of ideas for what everyone would like to do to celebrate," Weigel said with a smile.
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