Watch SpaceX Crew-8 astronauts return to Earth early Oct. 25 (Image Credit: Space.com)
The astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission will return to Earth early Friday morning (Oct. 25), and you can watch their homecoming live.
The Dragon capsule Endeavour is scheduled to splash down off the Florida coast on Friday at around 3:30 a.m. EDT (0730 GMT), wrapping up the nearly eight-month-long Crew-8 mission to the International Space Station (ISS).
You can watch coverage of Crew-8‘s reentry and splashdown here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, beginning at 2:15 a.m. EDT (0615 GMT). NASA will also livestream a post-splashdown press conference, which is expected to begin at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT).
Crew-8 launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket on March 4, carrying NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt and Jeanette Epps, as well as Alexander Grebenkin of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos, to the ISS.
The quartet were originally supposed to leave the orbiting lab on Oct. 7, but poor weather in the projected splashdown zone — including some caused by Hurricane Milton — delayed their departure multiple times. Mother Nature finally relented this week, and Endeavour undocked on Wednesday afternoon (Oct. 23).
Related: Hurricane Milton bears down on Florida with Category 5 strength in new ISS footage (video)
As its name indicates, Crew-8 is the eighth long-duration astronaut mission that SpaceX has flown to the ISS for NASA. The ninth is already at the orbiting lab; Crew-9 arrived on Sept. 29.
That latest mission carried just two astronauts — NASA’s Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov — instead of the usual four. NASA took two spaceflyers off Crew-9 to make room for Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who needed a ride home from the station.
Williams and Wilmore arrived at the ISS in June on the first-ever crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Their mission, called Crew Flight Test, was supposed to last just 10 days or so. But Starliner suffered thruster issues on its way to the ISS, and NASA extended the capsule’s orbital stay repeatedly to study the problem.
The agency ultimately elected to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which occurred without incident on Sept. 6. As part of that decision, Williams and Wilmore will return to Earth with Crew-9 in February 2025.