Sunita Williams is coming home: SpaceX Crew-10 docks with ISS after 28 hours. What happens now?

After a 28-hour orbital chase, SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission has successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), marking another milestone in international space collaboration.

The four-member crew, launched on March 14 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, arrived at the ISS early Sunday morning (March 16). Their Crew Dragon capsule, Endurance, connected to the station’s Harmony module at 12:04 a.m. EDT (0404 GMT) while flying 260 miles (418 kilometers) above the Atlantic Ocean.

The Crew-10 team includes NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. McClain serves as mission commander, Ayers as pilot, with Onishi and Peskov as mission specialists. The team will stay on the ISS for about six months, continuing the regular rotation of crew members aboard the orbiting lab.

Shortly after docking, Onishi expressed gratitude on behalf of the crew: "It's such a great honor for us to be part of this program," he said. "We have a lot of exciting work ahead of us that we are looking forward to. Again, thank you very much to everybody who helped us to get here."

In the next phase, the hatches between Endurance and the ISS are expected to open approximately 90 minutes after docking, followed by a welcome ceremony about 30 minutes later with the current ISS crew.

Crew-10 will take over from NASA's Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos' Aleksandr Gorbunov, who have been aboard the ISS for months. Hague and Gorbunov arrived in September on Crew-9, while Williams and Wilmore have been in orbit since June, initially part of Boeing’s Starliner mission, which was cut short due to thruster issues.

The outgoing Crew-9 astronauts are expected to return to Earth no earlier than March 19, aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, as NASA confirmed.