Crew-12 Arrives on Station
NASA’s Crew-12 mission docked to the International Space Station at 3:15 PM Eastern Time on February 14th, carrying 4 crew members aboard Crew Dragon Freedom. Arriving at the orbiting laboratory 34 hours after liftoff, Crew-12’s arrival concludes the saga of the station’s first-ever medical evacuation, demonstrating a successful response to and recovery from a minor emergency.
Crew-12 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Friday the 13th, rising into pre-dawn skies at 5:15 AM ET. Notably, SLC-40 is now the only pad from which SpaceX can launch astronauts, after the crew access arm was removed from Launch Complex 39A on Wednesday. SpaceX is working to convert LC-39A for Starship launches in the near future, including the construction of a new launch mount and tower.
After a spectacular nighttime ascent, Falcon 9 booster B1011 returned to Florida for landing, touching down at a newly-built pad called LZ-40, right next to the launch complex. SpaceX previously used two concrete pads for booster landings, LZ-1 and 2, built on the former site of LC-13. Now, LC-13 and other pads along Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s “Missile Row” will be reactivated to support new commercial launch providers such as Relativity Space, Firefly Aerospace, and Stoke Space.
The International Space Station is now back to its standard crew size of 7, completing a rare indirect handover. Ordinarily, a new set of crew members arrives before the prior crew departs; however, a medical event in January caused Crew-11 to return a few weeks earlier than planned.
NASA astronaut Chris Williams, briefly the only American onboard the ISS, performed the station-side pressure equalization procedures, culminating in Dragon’s hatch opening at 5:14 PM ET. Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev welcomed the new arrivals in a brief ceremony as each crew member passed into the station.
Speaking during NASA’s live coverage, Crew-12 commander Jessica Meir praised the teams that made their mission possible, and closed with an enthusiastic note: “let’s get rolling with Expedition 74!”
