SpaceX’s Crew-2 expected to splash down on Monday
CAPE CANAVERAL — Diaper-wearing astronauts are planning to depart the International Space Station on Sunday with an expected splashdown near Florida on Monday morning, NASA and SpaceX decided late Friday.
Bringing home Crew-2 first means a third delay for the next mission, which now will not launch from the Space Coast until at least Wednesday.
The diapers will be necessary because of a broken toilet on the capsule, which NASA astronaut Megan McArthur described the situation as “suboptimal” but manageable. She and her three crewmates will spend 20 hours in their SpaceX capsule, from the time the hatches are closed until splashdown.
“Spaceflight is full of lots of little challenges,” she said during a news conference from orbit. “This is just one more that we’ll encounter and take care of in our mission. So we’re not too worried about it.”
After a series of meetings Friday, mission managers decided to bring McArthur and the rest of her crew home before launching their replacements. That Crew-3 launch already had been delayed more than a week by bad weather and an undisclosed medical issue involving one of the crew.
SpaceX is now targeting liftoff for Wednesday night at 9:03 p.m. Wednesday Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, who will return with McArthur, told reporters that the past six months have been intense up there.
The astronauts conducted a series of spacewalks to upgrade the station’s power grid, endured inadvertent thruster firings by docked Russian vehicles that sent the station into brief spins, and hosted a private Russian film crew — a space station first.
They also had to deal with the toilet leak, pulling up panels in their SpaceX capsule and discovering pools of urine. The problem was first noted during SpaceX’s private flight in September, when a tube came unglued and spilled urine beneath the floorboards.
SpaceX fixed the toilet on the Dragon capsule awaiting liftoff but deemed the one in orbit unusable. Thus, the astronauts will have to rely on what NASA describes as absorbent “undergarments.”