NASA's SpaceX Crew-10 Post-Launch News Conference - 4K

At approximately 8:30 p.m. EDT on Friday, Mar. 14, 2025, following the successful launch of NASA's SpaceX Crew-10 mission, NASA hosted a post-launch news conference from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Participants in the briefing included Ken Bowersox, associate administrator, NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate; Steve Stich, manager, Commercial Crew Program, NASA Kennedy; Dina Contella, deputy manager, International Space Station Program, NASA Johnson; Sarah Walker, director, Dragon Mission Management, SpaceX; Mayumi Matsuura, vice president and director general, Human Spaceflight Technology Directorate, JAXA.

What is said in the film

Pray for your left arm. I started. Running. And I built my. Weapon and her ankle.

Over, over the rock. Hit my thing. We got the grant to go out. New possibilities are opening up for scientific cooperation between countries. You know, on their own.

With the Americans preferring the faith in the. Where's the house? Discovery. No wonder I love coming around here. Go for the morning panic, everybody.

Can fight it. Amen. We are headed back to get where we are. Back. To.

T-minus ten. Five. Five. Six. Five.

Four. Three. Three. Two. One.

Ignition and go! Go! The crew. Got myself into space. That is 310.

Launching away on Friday. 1. 7 million pounds of price. Hello, and welcome to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. For the post-launch news conference for NASA and SpaceX.

Successful crew ten launch to the International Space Station. And McClain, Nicole. Heirs to Coya Onishi and Kirill Peskov. Launch from Launch Complex 39 A at 7:03 p. m.

Eastern Daylight Time today, and are now in orbit. They are set to arrive at their destination, the International Space Station, at 11:30 p. m. Eastern Daylight Time on Saturday, March 15th. Joining me to answer your questions for the media in the room and online about the crew ten launch and mission are to my left.

Ken Bowersox, Associate Administrator, NASA Space Operations Mission Directorate Steve Stich, manager, NASA's Commercial Crew Program. Dena Costello, deputy manager, NASA's International Space Station Program Sarah Walker, director, Dragon Mission Management at Space X, and Mayumi Metzger, vice president and director general of the Human Spaceflight Technology Directorate at Jaxa. All right. We'll start off with some opening comments. And, Ken, we'll start with you.

Thanks. A good evening and thanks, everybody, for joining us tonight. For this conference. You know, part of NASA's job is to share what we do with the general public. And all of you are part of that.

So I want you to know how much I appreciate the work that you put into your reporting. To all the folks that are watching at home, I appreciate that you're here with us and listening to hear about the mission tonight. It was great to see, the Falcon nine and Dragon lift off with, an international crew from Russia, Japan and America. That always gets me excited. But I know we made you wait a couple days to to see that, we, spotted, small issue with the ground system.

It was so impressive to watch the team, make the call on console, decide what they were going to do, proceed through the troubleshooting and, and minor, fixes that had to be done the next day. Look at the weather, decide that the smart thing to do was to to move to today. And we were rewarded with beautiful weather and, and a really, really smooth launch. And, and and that's worth waiting for. I think, now we, we, we wait another day for crew ten to make their way to the space station, to join crew nine there.

They'll they'll hand over for a few days, and then we'll bring, crew nine back to Earth. And they'll splashdown, and we'll get to hear all their stories. Every crew that launches is, one more set of stories, one more, step to humanity moving to the moon and, out on to Mars. And so I hope you feel that when you see a Falcon nine lift off the pad. And when you see our crews come home, and now I'm going to pass over to Steve to give you some more of the technical details.

Yeah. Thanks, Ken. And thank you for being here. Thanks for your interest in the commercial Crew program and human spaceflight. As you watched, earlier, we had a great launch this evening at 7:03 p.

m. eastern. Was a very smooth countdown. Before I talk about the countdown and the mission, I just want to start out by saying how proud I am of the NASA and SpaceX team. As you know, we've talked about it.

It's been a unique flow. About a little more than six weeks ago, we swapped Dragon capsules. We swapped over, from the new capsule that's being built by SpaceX, over to endurance. And that new capsule is now on orbit with, with the crew, ten crew, of course. We, added, a parachute upgrade, the energy modulator, which, the drogues pull the mains out with a device that attenuates the load.

We have that on board the vehicle. And then, of course, we have a new, landing site, Tortuga, that we can use for crew nine. Crew nine is planned to be our last east coast landing. And then we're also preparing to move and transitioned landing operations to the West Coast. So we have a lot going on.

And then, executing the handover and bringing crew nine home. It's a big deal. When we last talked, we had a couple issues. So that remained from the, flight readiness review on March 7th. We closed those out.

We had some coating, degradation on the Draco thrusters. We ran a test at McGregor, looked at some other testing data and close that out. And then we also, SpaceX, we learned from every, non NASA Falcon nine mission. They had a Starlink anomaly post landing, with an engine eight combustion event post landing. And we looked at the data from that and we're able to clear that for flight.

You know, this team is, dedicated. Resilient and learns from every single flight, every single step. And I'm very proud of the team. Dragon endurance is on orbit now, and it's very healthy. Nominal spacecraft separation, nominal orbit insertion.

The nosecone open just fine. We tested out the forward bulkhead. Dracos. Those are doing fine. All the Draco thrusters are firing.

Well, we did a, phase burn, a little while ago, around 756 eastern. And that went well. Falcon nine performed extremely well. You saw the booster land at landing zone one and the one thing. And, Sarah, we'll talk more about it, is that you saw a little piece of foam come off, second stage tank on the LOX tank.

It's there for insulation. That was in the video. And so that was no issue for the flight. No recontact with, the dragon at all. On Wednesday, we ended up scrubbing, the launch, and the team did a great job with that scrub.

It turned out on the hydraulic system. There's a series of clamps that we have to release the Falcon nine at liftoff, and they have to move out of the way so that the rocket can then clear the launch pad. We saw some signs of air in the system that in the past, we've space-x has been able to bleed that air out of the system. If you've ever had squishy brakes in your car, it's the same thing where you have air in the system. And so you don't know the hydraulic system response.

They tried to flush that air out of the system on, on launch, say, on Wednesday. We couldn't get comfortable that all the air was out of there. So we took the prudent course of action and we scrubbed that day. And then SpaceX went in and bled the air out of the system. In some points of the lines that go to the Falcon nine heavy side of the system, they were able to get all that air out and ran a bunch of checks overnight, last night.

And into today. And the system performed very well today. You know, really, the vehicle is doing well on orbit Dragon. We're not really working any issues. We have about a 20.

5 hour, launch to dock profile setting up to rendezvous at 11:30 p. m. tomorrow night. The crew will go off duty, this evening. About this time, they'll do a few things, like grab some air samples and then set up some cabin temperature measurements.

And then, other than that, they'll be off duty. As you saw, the weather was just awesome today. We couldn't ask for a better day here at the launch site, and the abort weather. You know, the mission events. Heading into docking, we'll have, a Dragon mission management team, tomorrow evening around 8 p.

m. , and then we'll have, the this crew will get into their suits around 9 p. m. and then approach initiations right around 11 or 10 p. m.

eastern tomorrow night, and they'll docking at 1130. And we should have the hatches open about 130 in the morning. So we're looking forward to docking and starting off for the handover. Can't thank the team enough. And I'll turn it over to Dina.

All right. Thank you, Steve. And thank you all for being here. It was a spectacular launch. Really happy to have the crew on their way to the International Space Station and looking forward to seeing their happy faces on board very soon.

As is mentioned, they'll dock tomorrow night, 11:30 p. m. eastern time, to the forward port of the International Space Station. We're going to have a short handover with, the crew. Nine guys coming home.

No earlier than Wednesday. At this point, of course, we'll be looking for good weather. It might be later than Wednesday when they come home. We're trying to get the handover shorter. Because recently, and, last year, we've had some handovers that were more extended waiting on good weather.

And so we don't want to lose any good opportunities that we might have. In this case, we're trying to stretch the consumables. And, you know, we'd rather have less of an overlap of the crews in this, in this particular situation. So, yeah, after the crew, nine guys get home, the crew ten and the Soyuz crew on board, they have a lot of work to, to do. On this increment.

Just some of the highlights of the upcoming, items here in the next month or two. First off, we've got the north up Grumman 21 mission. That's currently berthed to station, and we'll have the crew stuff that full of trash. They've been working on that. But we're going to make sure that they can get as much trash in there as possible.

It's, around the 21st or so of this month, but we're assessing that date maybe a little later at this point. And that will unearth it, release it, and it will, reenter and be disposed of. And then, we have another crew exchange happening in the April time frame. So on April 8th, we have a Soyuz launch. It's with, Sergei, Reza Koff, Aleksey Zu Rizk and Jonny Kim.

They'll be taking off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. And, once they're on board, they'll be doing their their handover, coming home. We'll have a legacy of Chen and, Ivonne, Bogner and Don Pettit, and they'll come home on the 19th of April before Alexi Chin and leaves. He'll hand over the station command to, to acquire Onishi. And so I have a, jet, Jaxa commander on board at that point, on the heels of that crew exchange, we've got space X 32.

That's a cargo mission that's really important for us to be carrying. In addition to all the science that it'll be carrying. It's carrying a lot of crew supplies. The Northrop Grumman 22 vehicle that's launching this summer. That launch date is under review.

And so, the Grumman guys have noticed that the shipping container was damaged. You may have heard that from Dana Weigel from the last conference. And so, to be on the safe side, we've added some additional food, to the space. 632 mission. Just to make sure that we're stretching, consumables as much, as much as we can, but there's quite a bit of science that is going to be taking place, on this increment.

And I just want to give you a few examples. So on this mission on crew ten, launching, both launching up and coming down on crew nine, we've got, as an example, an ESA, European Space Agency payload that's studying immune health. Crew ten launching, on this flight right now in flight, we have a water filtration experiment. And on the way down on crew nine will be bringing home some red romaine lettuce leaves that were harvested by the crew on board. So while the crews there will be doing combustion experiments, I've been talking to thousands of students.

And we're doing a, a series of tests. The physiological and psychological, that will help us, on our trips to, you know, in our lunar adventures and on a future trip to Mars. So we have a lot of science going on. And, I think that some of you know, that it's the 25th anniversary of, continuous human presence coming up here in November, on board the international Space Station. But, you know, we live and breathe science every day on ISS and every day, researchers are learning something new.

So even 25 years later. So with that plug, I'm going to hand it over to Sarah. Okay. Thanks, Tina. Well, it has been an exciting week, as always down here at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

And it's an honor to be here today, having just launched our crew ten mission to the International Space Station. This was our first launched I. s. s. so far this year.

And when it, docks tomorrow night, it'll be the 45th Dragon and the 14th with a crew on board to visit the orbiting lab. So this mission was particularly dynamic, as many of you were aware, a little over a month ago, as Steve mentioned, NASA and SpaceX switched the Dragon spacecraft supporting this mission to accelerate the crew ten launch. And ultimately, the crew nine return. These types of schedule changes represent an enormous amount of work under the surface, from adjusting hardware milestones and test dates on multiple spacecraft to juggling traffic of the visiting vehicles on I. s.

s. , coordinating launch and reentry events with numerous external agencies, expediting hardware and cargo shipments across the country, and changing final training dates for the crew and operators, and so much more. So, I just wanted to say in all of this, SpaceX and NASA kept safety at the forefront as we methodically step towards, this launch date while accelerating the timeline by by several weeks. And then NASA also enabled this handover. Christina was talking about to be a few days shorter than typical, which further accelerates the crew nine return date coming up in just a few short days.

So we had originally set up to launch on Wednesday. But during Wednesday night's attempt, we, detected an indication in the data that there might be some trapped air. As Steve alluded to, in the ground side plumbing that leads to the hole down, clamps out at the pad. So we cycled the clamps themselves open and closed several times throughout the count to make sure that the kinematic behavior was exactly as expected. But we we couldn't figure out, why the signature was still showing.

There might be some error there in the system. And so, out of an abundance of caution, we, stepped into, scrubbing the launch for the day on Thursday. The teams, fed fluid through those lines to clear any potential trapped air. And then, turns out that resolve the issue and set up for a beautiful launch today. So tonight, I found it to be a fantastic day to launch, both being Pi Day and the 23rd anniversary of SpaceX's founding, 23 years ago on on March 14th.

So yes, we did have Pi in launch control, if you're wondering. And I'm happy to report that Falcon nine safely delivered the crew and Dragon to their intended orbit, with an anticipated arrival already been said about 11:30 p. m. tomorrow, eastern time. So if you're watching the webcast, you might have noticed something floating off during the separation event between Dragon and the second stage.

This is a piece of insulation foam from our stage to, lox dome. And these insulation tiles are known to sometimes liberate during this separation event. It doesn't pose any issues for Dragon or Stage two. It's, it's made out of Zotac. It's a, it's a foam material that did its job on the way to orbit.

And then it's okay if it liberates. After crew ten docks, it's the next big event for us. Will be bringing crew nine safely home to their families. We're excited to welcome Nick, Alex, Sonny and Butch back after the time at the space station, and we're inspired by all the groundbreaking research that they completed during their increment. So undocking currently no earlier than Wednesday, March 19th.

And as Dina mentioned, we will continue to look at the weather and find the best day to bring the crew home. Hopefully next week. So crew nine, will be the last Dragon mission to return to the East Coast before the recovery transition west that we've all been talking about. So crew nine will return to the Gulf at one of our five landing sites there, and then we'll have a few Dragon missions that land in the West Coast before crew ten comes home in July or August. So I want to say a huge thank you to our launch partners for your trust and collaboration on this launch.

There are so many ways that this these two missions were unique, but I think for me personally, the most powerful was being, a more integrated part of the global mission of human spaceflight. So we see this as a beacon of international collaboration. And crew nine felt like a small part of that, where two companies got to work together to the greater goal of, advancing human spaceflight missions and making humanity a space faring civilization. So that was an honor to be a part of. And, yeah, just thank you for having me today.

It's an honor to be a part of all this and all the research the crews aboard the space station conduct. Thank you. And Miami. Thank you. And thank you, sir.

Good evening, everybody. My, I am, Naomi Matsuura from Jaxa. And first of all, on behalf of Jaxa, I'd like to, sincerely, express our appreciation to NASA physics and our international partners and all those who are struggling. And for today's, content launch and the continuous ISS operation. And, and I am very happy to be here to share with you all, today's, success of growth and launch.

And, it is a great pleasure not only for me, but also for Japan. That Japanese astronaut boarded a, Crew Dragon for a fifth straight year since the since its, David Fried in 2020. And, I think this was, brought by close cooperation cultivated between us and Japan for years. Through ISS program. And as for, Takuya Onishi, this is a second iss de mission for him.

And during the first day, he said, he realized the importance of working together with ground team. And, and he had a strong desire to deepen his knowledge on, flight control, teamwork. And the other result, he became a flight director in, Japanese, Jaxa. Right, Victor. And it's cosine is a flight.

And, since then, he has been supporting the ISS and the Jim operation as the flight. And, and then, using his perspective as an astronaut. And in addition to that, as the animation, he where at Acquia, where support as, ISS commander this time while he is, on board and as far as I know, and I iss commander from active. Right. Victor is not only the first in Japan, but also in the world.

And many of them, many of, you are probably not aware of this, so I would like to highlight that point. And he where, undoubtedly, make good use, his, new knowledge, he gained, for, from, Jeff Wright work to serve as an ISS commander. And I do believe he was sure it's a great teamwork that, no one has ever seen before. And, this time I could tan mission is definitely, symbol of, solid internet know, partnership. And, and I know that partnership, not just K10, has been and will continue to be, essential for our space activities and, human space activity, as you know, expanding from ISS real, to, Fraser spheres such like, moon and Mars.

So today's success, based on our international partnership is, another step toward the front of the, future of future, space activities. And and lastly, I am deeply honored to, witnessed this historic moment with you all. And once again, to congratulation on the successful launch today. Thank you. All right.

Thank you all for those opening comments. We will now take your questions beginning with those in the room here at Kennedy. Please raise your hand, state your name and affiliation and to whom you are asking the question. And we'll start with Marsha. Nappi.

Looking ahead to splashdown. If you undock Wednesday, when might that occur? And given that Butch and Sunny have been up for nine months, are there any special precautions you're going to need to take to accommodate them? Or extra medical tests to learn more about long duration spaceflight? And what kind of celebrations are you planning after they've gone above and beyond for almost a year?

The first part in CFD and has anything to add. I think the undocking time we're looking at might be as early as, four in the morning eastern 4 a. m. , in terms of precautions, you know, they'll have the standard precautions that any crew has. They'll obviously have their suits that we've, we've sent up and tried them on.

They've got custom seats that are made to fit their body and their suits. And then, you know, every crew that comes back goes through, a fluid loading protocol just to make sure, when they get back, that their body is conditioned properly, but they'll go through all there's nothing beyond what we'll normally do. They have done training already on, on the Dragon spacecraft while they've been on orbit to get familiar with the differences in the suits and the umbilical holes and the seats and all that. So. So, they'll be ready to come home when we're ready.

We'll watch the weather. You know, the weather's always a challenge. It's always windy over the water. We'll have to find the right opportunity. And then in terms of celebrations, I don't think we've thought that far ahead.

Obviously, we're excited to get crew nine back. And, I know Butch and Sunny are excited to come back. And then, we'll celebrate. You know, when they're ready, I'll take a little time to get them back reconditioned, and then we'll we'll do that a proper celebration and see if then has anything to add. I'll just add a couple of things that, And doc, if it's around four in the morning on Wednesday, it will.

The phasing will vary depending on where our landing site will be. And you know how long we're going to we'll, be in transit essentially to that splashdown location. Yeah. Sarah had mentioned that we'll be targeting only certain sites. The goal sites essentially, in Florida.

So we'll have fewer opportunities. But we haven't pinpointed the exact one that'll be available to us. I'll also just note that, Butch and Sydney have been on orbit, for a little over 280 days or something, so we can get you that trivia. But the, the. There have been many crewmembers who've been on orbit longer than that.

And so, we don't see any need for any special precaution, like any astronauts coming back. There's a acclimation period. And so and that'll vary by crewmember. And also it does vary by how long they've been on orbit. Sometimes.

So, but, I'm not aware of any special precautions or parties, although of course, you never know. All right, let's go to the front row here on the left hand side. Hi. I'm Faith Abubey. I'm with ABC news.

There are several steps before the crew. Ten team law docs of the I. s. s.. Are there any more concerns about anything that could possibly go wrong at this point?

I mean, obviously there's lots of steps, right? There's a series of, maneuvers we have to do. We did one maneuver today, a rendezvous maneuver. We'll do a number of those as well. The crew today got out of.

We'll get out of their suits and me in the spacecraft, and then they'll get back in their suits for docking. We'll check out the docking system. We'll go through all the standard steps. We're going to take it one step at a time and watch the vehicle carefully, and watch the crew carefully on the way to rendezvous and docking. But there's nothing unusual so far.

The spacecraft is very healthy, the crew is healthy, so we'll just take it one step at a time on the way to docking. And Steve's being very modest, getting a spacecraft to rendezvous with another object in orbit. It requires incredibly precise navigation and planning. And our systems do that very well. Right.

And so what he's saying is our systems are all working good. So we're going to be able to do that really amazing thing and dock with the space station. All right. Another question in the front. Thank you.

Sawyer Rosenstein NSF. This is probably for Steve. I know there was questions on the Wednesday attempt, the fact that you had sphere X launching within less than 24 hours. There was a Starlink that was supposed to launch within less than 24 hours. Can you kind of clarify the NASA rule to if that is still the case?

With no Falcon launches 24 hours before one of the NASA missions? And are there any plans to reduce that time as the launch cadence goes up? Yeah, that's a good question. We, we had initially a number of years ago established a 48 hour time frame in between our launch and another, Falcon nine launch. We recently for this mission reduced that time to 24 hours.

And then we looked at the timing of the specific missions. Sphere X was about 21 hours. And we talked to our team and looked at the amount of work we needed to do, to look at the of the vehicle at Falcon nine launch for sphere X, we also had a NASA team in place observing that launch. And so we, we adjusted the time to 21 hours. So we're constantly looking at those missions.

What we feel like now is, we learn from every single Falcon nine flight. And so it's really an advantage, a safety advantage to us to have, Falcon nine fly, see if we can learn something from that flight. And if there's something off nominal, we can actually stand down, evaluate it. So. So we had the benefit before our flight of not only the sphere X launch, the NASA, SMD launch, but also a Starlink launch as well that fell within that 21 hour period.

All right. We are going to take a phone question. We'll come back into the room and get you guys, Mike and Megan Madan Berg with the Wall Street Journal. Hey, good evening, for Steve and Sarah, did NASA and SpaceX accept more risk for the crew ten flight compared with earlier crew missions? Given the changes that have been, you know, you guys made in the run up to this week, and if that's the case, could you kind of explain that and quantify it if possible?

Thanks very much. Yeah, I wouldn't say there are any any additional risks taken. This is one of the benefits of having multiple spacecraft in different processing lanes at the same time. The vehicle that we switch to was pretty far along in its, launch processing campaign for another mission that we're flying later, later in the spring. And so that was available.

We did look at, some of the nuanced differences between requirements of of various contracts, between the NASA contracts and others. And that drove, some amount of work on, on this particular vehicle. He was mentioning the, the coating degradation that we looked at, to ensure, that the engines were ready to fly. But but no, it was a pretty standard prelaunch process other than switching around, the order of audio of hardware and tests. And, when we did what on which spacecraft, from my perspective and from NASA perspective, we went through our normal process.

We did it in and I, I would say in a accelerated timeframe, you know, we look at what we call non conformance as anything that, maybe any, any valve that didn't perform exactly per the spec or exactly per the right timing. We looked at, we have certain witnesses that we do and inspection points, that we go through as the Dragon spacecraft is built up. You know, we missed a couple of those on the NASCAR side. We actually witnessed the heat shield installation, but we went and looked at all the build records. We have enough experience with the technicians for the heat shield assembly, and so we felt comfortable with that.

Probably the one area that maybe was a little bit more risk, I would say, was the coating on these thrusters. These thrusters had flown a few more times than we had in the past. We went and analyzed that very carefully. We did a set of testing with a very similar thruster. Space-x.

Did it in McGregor, Texas. And then we went back and looked at the qualification data just to make sure we were good to go. So we went through our standard process, standard flight readiness review, and Commercial Crew Agency for our process. Solicited dissenting opinions, ask our engineers if they were ready. And, you know, we felt very confident to go into the launch campaign.

And, Steve, remind me that the fleet following or the witnessing of tests and inspections that you guys do with us, you often do that, not just you follow not only the capsule. That's the primary plan for your, mission, but also others. Was was this one that you had already been following along with to some extent as well, and following this capsule, obviously we had flown it before last time was on crew seven. And we had started a little bit early to start looking at this capsule. And the capsule also has some upgrades.

One of the upgrades that I talked about is a new energy modulator system. You know, we had seen we talked about skip stitching on previous flights. We're flying, an energy modulator on this particular vehicle that we tested at the Langley Research Center. There's a facility there that we can actually subject that energy modulator to all the loads and forces that we would see in flight. And we think this is a significant upgrade that we're going to go fly.

So, as Sarah said, we followed the whole fleet and, and we're we were in a good posture to go fly this vehicle. Okay. Question here in the second row was talking space question for Steve thinking about troubleshooting and problem solving. What would be a key? It seems like focus would be a key element to successful troubleshooting and problem solving.

What would help you individually and the teams that are part of the organization to focus and have success each day, each challenge? Yeah, I think, you know, in in engineering and spaceflight, I was just thinking this morning, you know, I was texting a friend and, and, he asked me if the launch was still on track. I said, yeah, the launch is still on track. Everything's working fine. And then I thought to myself, a spacecraft and a launch vehicle on the pad has millions of parts that have to work correctly, and we have to test those parts.

And every single day, and I've been watching our team very carefully ever since the beginning of the year. And they've been focused. They've been going through the testing on the vehicle I've been following, along with the testing, doing independent analysis that NASA does. And so, you know, we're very focused on this mission, crew ten. And then we'll be focused.

We're also focused on the crew nine vehicle on orbit and making sure that vehicles are safe to bring, the crew nine crew back as well. So it's really just attention to detail every single day, making sure that everybody does their job. It's a bit like, a football team, you know, everybody has their job, whether you be an offensive lineman, a wide receiver or tight end, you have your job to do, and you just watch to make sure that that, everybody is being diligent and asking the right questions and, and the interaction between NASA and SpaceX is phenomenal. On the particular problem we had at the launch pad, you know, the NASA team looked at the data and Spacexs team looked at the data. We weren't quite comfortable, had multiple meetings back and forth on the data.

Just just today with a NASA guide, one of our experts on the hydraulic system wanted to report all the data one last time, just to make sure we're ready to go fly. And he did that, and I talked to him. Before I went on console and and he was ready to go. So. All right, a question here in the front row.

Yeah. Eliana, Sheriff with Ellie and Space. And this question is for whoever can answer it. The current administration has made claims that the previous administration refused to bring home the Starliner astronauts, despite an offer being made. Can you give us any clarity about this?

I think the short answer is I can't give you a lot of clarity there because those discussions, I wasn't part of, so I can't tell you if they did happen or didn't happen. All I can tell you is NASA is an incredible nonpartisan agency. We get support from, whoever is in office. Our presidents always care a lot about what happens at NASA. And it's great to see that, that trend continue with our current president.

He injects a lot of energy, into our, our thought processes. And, and that's been helpful for us. Let's go to the back of the room. Bill Harwood. Hey, thanks.

Bill Harwood. CBS news, for really anybody, you know, this mission is taken on this whole thing with crew nine and getting Bush and Sonny home, that I've never really seen with any other mission to this level. I don't know whether you call it hype or whether you call it. Is it reasonable? What do you guys think about that?

The fact that you're launching crew ten, but you can't start a story about crew ten without putting Bush and Sonny in the lead. So which is which is fine with me. I'm not complaining about that. I'm just I'm just wondering what you guys think of that from a NASA perspective, the way this has taken on this life of its own. Okay, I can start and then let Kim, can comment.

I mean, I, I appreciate all the interest in the mission. I appreciate the interest in NASA, but but for us, it's really about doing the job that we do every single flight to get the crew ten Dragon spacecraft, the Falcon nine vehicle ready to go fly to fly the crew that we have on that spacecraft to this station and then execute the handover. And same thing with the spacecraft that's there. You know, just a few days ago, we inspected the thermal protection system, just like we would for any mission. To make sure that it's good to go a return home with the external high def cameras on the space station and also the robotic arm.

So we try to just focus on what's important, and what's important is really making sure that we can safely return the crew and safely get the crew there and, try to avoid I try to avoid with my team getting too much into the hype, you know, and they are so focused and doing their job. I'm so proud of both the SpaceX and NASA team for doing their job in this situation. That's as you said, Bill. It's a little different than what we experienced in the past, and I'll see if there's anything to add. I'll just say it's great to see how much people care about our astronauts.

If it was me, I might use different words. You know, I think people use words to describe things based on their point of view and their frame of reference. For me, if I was going to describe the crew, I would describe them as, professional, devoted, committed, really outstanding astronauts. Okay, we're going to go to the phone line for our next question. Chris Davenport.

Hey, thanks very much for doing this. And, Sarah, thanks for mentioning that piece of insulation foam that came loose from the second stage. You said this has happened before and doesn't pose a problem. You know, but the word loose insulation foam is just going to generate a certain response given. Well, you know, and I'm just I'm just wondering if this is something that SpaceX is going to look to try to fix and prevent from happening again, or if it's something that just happens and it's unavoidable.

Thank you. Yeah. So, these foam tiles are mounted to our LOX dome. Which gets very cold. The temperature changes drastically throughout, the course of it successfully getting the the vehicle into orbit.

And so it's, I would say expected that occasionally you'll see, some liberate, just because of the thermal environment that it's exposed to as it's doing its job to, to get to orbit on our satellite missions. There's actually an adapter that that covers these foam pieces that the satellite is mounted to. And so you don't see it as, as commonly then, but Dragon, which has a kind of open air trunk, you'll you'll more commonly see these, these pieces coming out of, out of the you. But but this is a known risk that we carry in our system, that we've analyzed and we've, we've expected because we've, we've seen it before. So, you know, I think the good thing about the foam, right, at Dragon, at Falcon nine, dragon separation, as Sarah said, that it's that foam is contained within the trunk.

Dragons moving away. So in terms of velocity that that foam could make contact with anything. It's very low. It's a very lightweight piece. And so SpaceX has assessed that.

And we know that's not a concern. I'm sure that's one of the things that SpaceX will go look at. And as they always do, to see if they can correct it over time. But in this time frame, it's not like some of the foam kind of scenarios. We've had another programs.

All right. We will come back to the room after we take one more question on the phones from Joey Roulet with Reuters. Okay. Thanks, Darryl. And thanks, guys, for doing this.

And congrats on what sounds like a successful launch. And I just wanted to follow up on Mica's question. And Steve just kind of get like a quantifiable, response or some kind of number on what the probability, of loss of crew for this flight was, or how different that might have been from past flights. I mean, I think, you know, you said that this was a kind of an unusual preflight process this time around. And so I just, you know, figured it'd be good to get a number on if there was any kind of numerical difference on the probability of loss of crew for this flight that you guys accepted.

Thanks. Yeah. Oh, gosh. I don't have the lost crew number that we use from the design phase, with me, but there would have been no change in that essentially, for this, for this flight. I wouldn't have we wouldn't have assigned a new loss of crew risk for this flight based on our process.

Again, I felt like we started looking at capsule 210, endurance late last year a little bit because we thought we might be in this situation. So we started looking at some of the non-conformists as we started looking at some of the data. I mean, the Dragon vehicles, if you just compare them, they are all virtually identical except for a capsule 2 or 6, the very first spacecraft, the prop systems a little different on that one. So in terms of, you know, the safety risk for this vehicle, it really was unchanged from any other previous flight. So we didn't assign any new loss of crew number for the flight.

Okay. So the front row here will has a question. Hi Will Robinson Smith with Spaceflight Now. Thank you all for your time this evening. Question to Steve and to Sarah.

In the write up after the launch readiness review was mentioned that the, leak issue that was present in B 1086 when it landed and had the subsequent fire that that was cleared to move forward with this launch. But that, root cause had not been found yet at that point. Has that been resolved now? And, did this flight provide any additional data that might help clear that? Thanks to me to go further.

Yeah. So we are still moving through our root cause of why the fire? What, originated. But what we did ahead of the Spirit's mission and the crew ten mission is we asked ourselves of all the possible causes. Could any of these have any correlation or connection to what will happen on the ascent phase of a mission, which is what matters for, for this mission?

And, in this case, the answer was no. We found that there would have to be three separate anomalous events all happening simultaneously in the first 2 or 3 minutes of flight in order to see anything like what we saw there, there post landing. And so, that that got us comfortable with the, that with that not being an elevated risk to this mission. And, and SpaceX did a great job of looking at, I would say forensics from that, that booster, the 1086 booster on the, on the Droneship, they, they actually looked at a particular fitting that might have been a source of a fuel leak, that it had a very interesting signature where it wasn't as, of course, you have it when you have a combustion event after landing, you're going to see a lot of heat damage components. This one wasn't.

So they think maybe this particular fitting might have been leaking a little bit of fuel on that particular booster. We went and analyzed our booster. We did a static fire. We didn't see any fuel leaks. We actually sniffed for fuel to see if there was any president in any of the nine engine bays.

There was not. We actually went in on a couple the bays and looked at this area where there was a fitting. And so that's a potential root cause. And then we looked at, you know, the thing that you would be worried about if you had a fuel leak is a LOX leak during ascent. And we the vehicle that we just flew was very tight during static fire.

It was tight during all the testing in McGregor. And so that gave us rationale to go fly the flight. And of course, SpaceX resumed their other missions as well. And we learned from those flights. Okay.

Third row. Sorry. Yeah. This is one of the cool things about that. It's just another important part of all of this.

If there were to be a fire to break out in one engine, for example. And we did actually see an engine out scenario. Gosh, in the old, old days, I think it was year 1 or 2, to ten, 12 years ago. Right. But that mission, that rocket had an engine out.

It has sufficient, scaffolding to isolate the fire to that single engine bay. And then the rest of the, engines complete the, the mission as planned. And so and that's, I guess, an additional layer of protection. If we were to see an event like this, we wouldn't expect it to propagate to the rest of the rocket. So, para with NBC news, thanks again for doing this.

This is for whoever wants to answer this one. I'm sure you're still seeing this as I, what do you say to people that are still calling Butch and Sunny stuck or stranded, quote unquote, and calling crew ten a, quote, rescue mission? You want to do that one, Steve? I mean, yeah, it's for first, first principle in spaceflight. You always have a way for the crew to come home.

And Butch and Sunny have had a way to come home all the way back to the crewed flight test mission. If you remember their vehicle, if there would have been a contingency they were going to come home in Starliner first, then we transition to the crew eight vehicle and then the crew nine vehicle. So they've always had a way to come home. To me, we are embarking upon, a handover with two crews, and Butch and Sonny happened to be part of the expedition. Now they've been there for a number of months, almost ten months now.

And they've executed spacewalks and they've done science. And so for me, it's it's a normal handover, uniquely this time, we launched Butch and Sonny with the Starliner. We're bringing them home on a dragon. That's the only difference to me. And maybe Ken has something to add.

Yeah. You know, if you look at it mathematically by percentage of the original planned mission, this is the largest percentage extension, right? That's probably how we had engineers will think about it in the future. Is mathematically, there's been other really long extensions. We've had other people stay up there a really long time.

But, if you look at what was expected and what they ended up with, this one unit was a big percentage of the initial plan. But every astronaut that launches into space, we teach them. Don't think about when you're coming home. Think about how well your mission's going. And if you're lucky, you might get to stay longer.

And it it really is a gift. When you get to stay longer in space. I on my, most recent flight, I did get to stay a little bit longer than we planned, and I was so happy that we did get to stay longer. The reasons were terrible that we stayed longer on our mission. But, one of the positives, about everything that happened was more time in space, and, and Don Pettit is up there right now.

I flew with Don 20 years ago. The only time we ever came closer to an argument in space was when we argued over who might get to stay longer, because they were talking about having us extend for an extra six months and spend a year in space. Neither one of us got to. So we both got home, and then he he eventually won that because he flew again and is still up there now. Standing, up.

I can. Hi. Thank you for doing this. I walked in a little late picking up the camera, so I'm wondering about, the es. Can you report anything about that?

A lot of people are wondering about that. Is it mitigated? It's getting worse. Getting better? What are you doing?

Thanks. Sure. So, you're talking about the colleague? At the back end of the Russian service module? And, that is still, still ongoing.

We the, Roscosmos keeps that hatch closed, for most of the time. So, the only time they go in there would be for accessing the progress vehicle in order to get consumables or, supplies out that from a progress vehicle, or in order to specifically do inspection or repair associated with that. You know, we monitor the leak carefully. And, try to determine whether we have, you know, additional increases in the leak rate. Right now it's fairly steady.

And so, but again, the crew doesn't I mean, crew does not go in that module very often. So, we just take the little short snippets of data here and there as we go. The investigation has been ongoing, and Roscosmos leads the investigation. We have our, our team as well, providing assistance, in terms of testing or analysis, and providing data. But our our team is working very closely with the Roscosmos team on that.

Let's say the status is not really changed. Are they doing any stress testing of the materials to see what it can, what it can take up to? Thanks. So we on the NASA side have, we do have some of the Russian, materials, and we are doing testing on those types of materials, various types of tests that we've coordinated with our Roscosmos, colleagues and Roscosmos colleagues. Also, they of course understand their material very well and perform, some tests.

So the answer is yes. And we are trying to to correlate what we're seeing and, go over those results as we have them with our Roscosmos colleagues. Another question to the front of the room on this side. ABC news. Thank you again.

I'm not sure if you've spoken to them yet, but what's been the reaction to the successful launch by the crew? The Sunny and Butch team on the ISS? And how significant is it that we had a female pilot and a female commander on crew ten? So first of all, I think it's really cool that we had, two females in the flight crew, two women in the flight crew. And I think it's cool that, Ann's one of them because she was one of the first in a two woman Eva.

I don't know. Sarah wanted to talk a little bit about that, so I was just telling them before this that I've got three daughters at home that I know were watching tonight. And so I was excited to to see see them on board and, thankful to them for a milestone that, hopefully many more will follow after. And Dina may have gotten something from crew nine. I'm sure they're excited.

Have you heard anything yet? Dina, about coming home? Yeah, about the fact the crew turns on the way. Oh, well, I have not heard yet, but, the the launch occurred while the crew was asleep. They might have gotten up and taken a peek.

I'm not sure about it, so I've not really heard anything yet. But it's possible that they were just, quietly watching. I suspect they're excited that there's new faces coming. Right? A new people coming, and they they know they're going to get to come, come on with their see their families pretty soon.

So. All right. The question there in the fourth row, gentlemen, back there. Hi. Thank you so much.

I'm Nick Valencia with CNN. This question is to dovetail off of an earlier question, but for you at space, Sarah, Ken may not have been part of the conversations for the initial offer from Elon Musk about bringing these astronauts home earlier. But I imagine as the director of Dragon, that you might have been, I'd love to know what the specifics were of that offer. What was made into who it was? It made at the Biden administration in the white House.

Yeah. So I, I wasn't in the conversation either. I'm grateful for the leaders in our nation, in the spheres of politics and policy, my spheres engineering. But what I do know from almost 15 years of working with this exact team, with Commercial Crew and ES, is that, that NASA is always looking at multiple options, every option available, for any operation that they may go do, and then many contingency options for when the unexpected inevitably happens. And so I got to see that in this case, and we certainly brought all the ideas we had, to, to the specifics of the operation.

And then we were just thankful to be a part of, the, the path that was chosen. Yeah. SpaceX has been a great partner for us. Whenever we have something come up that's a little bit different on orbit, they help us figure out how to handle it, how to out of, modify Dragon or come up with a, an extra way of dealing with our different contingencies. Okay, let's go to the other side of the room.

Now. Yes. Hi, I'm Jake from the National Space Society. My question is for Dina and anyone else who might want to, answer. It's always impressive to see the partnerships, the diversity, the collaborative efforts.

We have NASA, Jaxa, Roscosmos here. How do all those collaborations point to mission success and the objectives of the International Space Station? And also, I work with a lot of students. And for the others, what lessons can I share with students about the success and how this works? Well, I'll just give you my my thoughts on this.

You know, the the intergovernmental agreement that was signed many years ago and led to the International Space Station, you know, somebody had to think of that and put it on paper. And then as people plowed into trying to actually assemble and build the space station, you can imagine that there's a lot of, you know, discussions about how would be built and who would have what pieces of that. But over time, it's just slowly gotten to to a point where on a daily basis, it'd be just like you and I having a conversation. And we do this with our Jaxa colleagues and our European colleagues and our Russian colleagues on the ground on a daily basis to operate the station on board, the crews are having dinner together, from different nations. You know, when you're all working together on a common problem, you don't really see, I'd say, any differences?

You see, each other a little bit more, as it's working towards the same goal. So I just say same as, same as on Earth. When people are aligned on a common goal. That's really helpful. The ISIS really is kind of a shining example of what you can do on a huge scale internationally if you're all partnered together.

So I'm not sure if I answered all the questions. But that's my thoughts on it. Thank you. But in sports are really poignant. When she got to orbit, I think that was in the webcast.

Is that when and first where it's down to the ground team, were they poignant? Poignant about collaboration. They were. Yes they were. All right.

The gentleman in the second row has been patiently waiting. Hi. Thanks for being here. Nick Gibson with the Spokesman-Review. I'm curious what the last few days were like for the members of crew ten.

Following the delay, Wednesday. Is there anything you do to help keep them prepared for the mission, and how do they pass the time? I would say from my perspective, you know, when we called the scrub on Wednesday, they understood. They know what it's like that when you get in a drag and you get in the launch vehicle, there's a chance that you're not going to go that day. They got out.

They were very professional, very complimentary. They did. We did a debrief with them after that operation, just to make sure there was nothing that we could do better the next time that went really well. And then they followed kind of the issues and what's happening, maybe spend a little time with each other and, maybe study their procedures a little bit more. And then when it's time to go on launch day, you could tell.

And, and the crew were ready again. And, Ken, you probably been there before. I don't know if you have anything to add. You know, I've, I've launched on time before it was rare, but we did launch on time even back in the space shuttle era. And then, had missions where we scrubbed seven lots of times, quite scrubbed six times, and, after a while it gets old.

But the first one is kind of nice, because you get a chance to rest a little bit. Usually people are tired building up to the launch. And you can catch up with all the notes that you didn't write down and spend a little extra time with your family. So generally, that first scrub is kind of nice, but I don't know, you'll you'll have to ask the, the crew ten crew when they came back, what they really thought about it. Jessica Meir had reported out on our broadcast that she's friends with Anne McClain.

She said they went to the astronaut beach house. So several members spent the day there with, some of their family members. So thank you for that question. We'll take another one here on the first row. Thank you.

Appreciate that. So you're giving it the NSF? This is probably for Sarah. So Crew Dragon endurance I know had to swap out for the new capsule. Wasn't ready, but my understanding was canceled.

This capsule kind of bounced around again from crew nine to frame two to axiom for now, to crew ten. Can you kind of explain why that was and what the space process is for, determining what capsule, for what mission? I, I, I think some of those might not have. I'm too I'm trying to remember the history now, I know that, let's see, we had a new capsule originally in preparation. It's now, probably going to fly the axiom mission.

That's coming up in May. You know, we have 4 or 5 lanes of processing where we get to swap in capsules at different phases of their, of their flow. And we usually have multiple in parallel or some awaiting, certain processing steps depending on what their launch date is. And so it's relatively straightforward for us to, switch what we're doing and what lane or move capsules around. And we've kept, as I think Steve already mentioned, we've kept our capsules so similar.

That that makes it a lot easier to do whenever we roll in changes or upgrades to one capsule, we retrofit all the other capsules with those same changes. And so there's no capsule that's getting behind another capsule where we'd have a lot of work to do if we were to do a swap. We just have a fleet of of five spacecraft, five crew spacecraft and three cargo spacecraft that could fly any mission that that they need to. So, you know, time is almost up. I'm sorry, Steve, I have to say I'd have to go back and look.

I think at one point the new capsule was a you're testing my memory, but I think one point we were going to fly it on crew. Crew nine maybe. And then we moved off of that new capsule off of crew nine. But I would say that building a new capsule, it just it takes a lot of, hard work and dedication and building some new components up. You know, we had built the first four capsule kind of in, fairly rapid succession over a couple three year period, 206207 and then 210 and 212, and then now this one's a little lagging behind.

So sometimes it takes a little longer when that you got a vehicle that's lagging behind. But the thing I would most compliment our team at SpaceX on is the adaptability. When we looked at the manifest and saw that, hey, we really like to fly this, this mission in March, ahead of the Soyuz handover. And we looked at capsule 210 and we started our team started looking at it to see if we could go really get all the data reviewed. We pivoted together very quickly, and that is the beauty of having multiple capsules ready at multiple times for multiple missions.

And and we NASA appreciate that and we took advantage of that. So okay, our time is almost up. We'll take another question from NBC news in the back. Gina, this might be a question for you. Two quick ones.

First, you mentioned that 4 a. m. Wednesday might be the earliest opportunity for crew nine undocking. So is there a world where they would have splashdown? I know we don't know exactly where they're targeting, but would that potentially be the same day?

What would be the soonest possible and then the other question I had is we know Elon Musk talked about the possibility of the orbiting the ISS as soon as 2027. I'm curious what your thoughts are, if that's possible to do. The first question is, I think it is possible we could splash on the same day. Certainly very possible. Again, it just depends on the transit time.

Associated with where the orbit lines up and then the splashdown opportunity that we select on the Gulf Coast. And then, I'll just caution you, though, that it's, it's could be difficult to find good weather on the very first day. So, if you were even trying to pinpoint the day, I'm not sure we've really done that yet. So, just to that's that would be the no earlier than day. And then in terms of, i.

s. s. , you know, we are following our policy, you know, for, you know, the current administration has us, the orbiting, in 2030. And that's where our international partners have agreed to. We have, Roscosmos has agreed to go to 2028.

And they're working on, you know, we're working with everyone on that, the orbit process more working in that general direction. So, that's where we are with that. And I can if you had anything to add. Just just that I would say, Elon's all about going to Mars. He has been since he started SpaceX and before that.

Right. So it doesn't surprise me that that he wants to focus on that. That excites me too. But what I'll tell you is our work in low-Earth orbit, our work with ES, the future work we'll do on our commercial, Leo platforms, low-Earth orbit platforms is about Mars two, and one of the fastest ways to get to Mars is to do work in low-Earth orbit. So I think we're going to have a lot more time, with astronauts doing their work close to Earth, in orbit nearby.

Okay. We just have a few more seconds so we can grab one more from will. You know, wrap it up. Thanks. I'll make this a quick one.

Regarding the the future of of Dragon return, starting with crew ten, when they are ready to to come back. I know the plan is to splashdown off the coast of California, but will a dragon recovery vessel stay in Florida as a contingency, or will both of them move to the west Coast for that? Thanks. So we only need one vessel on the West Coast for, the specific setup over here, we have three landing sites. They're all very close together.

There's no need for the with the with the panhandle of Florida, you kind of needed to to take advantage of the entire Florida coast, within a certain distance that you could helicopter the crew and cargo to, to their final destinations. We don't need that over on the West Coast. We've actually already moved, a vessel, Shannon. Over, over to the West coast. And it's undergoing final preparations for, for for its first its first missions.

And then we actually had a number of facilities and then some that we're upgrading, some that we're building over here. You may remember we returned 20 dragons, in the early cargo program over on the West Coast. And so we got to leverage that. But, yeah, we have entirely new requirements with commercial Crew program, and Science Processing that, we've benefited from, these later contracts that we want to continue on the West Coast as well. So some new stuff, but also some, some heritage.

All right. Thank you all for your questions today. And thank you to the panel for coming in and answering them. If you'd like to listen in to crew audio as they make their way to the ice, you can snap the QR code that you see at the bottom of your screen. We will be streaming mission audio commentary@nasa.

gov for small media and to continue following the crew ten mission. Stay tuned to our streaming platform NASA plus or online@plus. nasa. gov. We leave you now with highlights a look back from suit up to launch.

Crew ten is getting suited up, ready to go. Time now for the traditional card game crew ten. Walking down the hallway. And here they come. Taking their first steps outside as they prepare for their journey to the International Space Station.

And we are off the crew on their way to Space launch pad 39, a and Maclay Nicole Ayres making their way into their Dragon spacecraft endurance. And here come our mission specialist, down the crew, successor to Korea, Onishi and Kirill Peskov. There they are, rotating back. Dragon SpaceX has just closed ignition and liftoff. They don't have to take off.

What else can this man. I'm serious that you don't have a space station. 1. 7 million pounds of thrust now propelling Falcon nine and ten. And we're continuing to get good call out on the first stage of performance so far.

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