In preparation for the arrival of NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test (read this news item), four crew members aboard the ISS will relocate the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft to a different docking port on Thursday, May 2nd., to make way for Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
NASA will provide live coverage of the move beginning at 7:30 a.m. EDT on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.
NASA astronauts Matt Dominick, Mike Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, will undock from the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:45 a.m. The spacecraft will then autonomously dock with the module’s space-facing port at 8:28 a.m.
The relocation, supported by flight controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, will free up Harmony’s forward-facing port for the docking of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft for its first flight with astronauts in May. Starliner will autonomously dock to the forward-facing port of the Harmony module, delivering NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station.
This will be the fourth port relocation of a Dragon spacecraft with crew, following previous relocations during the Crew-1, Crew-2, and Crew-6 missions.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission launched March 3 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and docked to the space station March 5. Crew-8, targeted to return this fall, is the eighth rotational crew mission from NASA and SpaceX as a part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.
Learn more about space station activities by following @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the ISS Facebook, ISS Instagram, and the space station blog.