Leaving the International Space Station will be bittersweet for its outgoing crew, who’ve been living aboard the orbital lab since February performing maintenance and upgrades and carrying out dozens of microgravity research experiments.
The astronauts of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission launched to the ISS on Feb. 13 and are now gearing up for their return to Earth. When exactly that might take place, however, is still up in the air, as their replacements don't yet have a launch date. NASA and SpaceX had targeted Sept. 12 for the liftoff of Crew-13, but have twice delayed that mission to allow additional time for preflight tests and data analysis. Now, NASA is targeting a Crew-13 launch no sooner than early October, according to a Sept. 16 statement from the space agency.
As is standard practice with ISS crew rotations, the astronauts of Crew-12 will remain aboard the station and continue a typical day-to-day schedule through a brief overlap period between crews once their replacements are safely aboard. In the meantime, the members of Crew-12 — NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev — are reflecting on their time in space and also looking forward to the comforts of Earth upon their return.
The quartet gathered in the station’s Kibo laboratory module for a call with reporters yesterday (Sept. 16) to discuss the past several months aboard the ISS and their upcoming trip home. It was the first time “in quite a while,” Meir said, that just the four Crew-12 astronauts found themselves together. They currently share the station with the three astronauts of Russia’s Soyuz MS-29 mission — NASA's Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina.
Their coming together “really started evoking those memories of our trip up here and our ride on the [SpaceX] Dragon, and of course started to get us anticipating that ride home that hopefully we're going to have pretty soon around the corner,” Meir said on the call.
All four reflected on some of their most profound moments during their spaceflight and shared some of what they’re looking forward to once they’re back on Earth. “My biggest eureka moment happened just recently, on the final spacewalk that we did,” Meir said, referring to her Sept. 1 extravehicular activity (EVA). She performed a total of four EVAs during this current stint aboard the ISS, bringing her career total spacewalk tally to seven.
“It was the first time that I ever got to ride the Canadarm on a spacewalk,” Meir said, describing the EVA as a “full circle” moment. She helped fix the Canadarm during a previous spacewalk on this mission, “and then to ride it with these guys driving me around was the most incredible feeling,” she said.
Fedyaev recalled another notable spacewalk event. During the May 27 Roscosmos EVA that featured cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, Fedyaev controlled the station’s European Robotic Arm (ERA) with both his comrades attached.
“The most [memorable] moment in my flight was the work with the ERA manipulator,” Fadyaev said. “We moved … two cosmonauts in one moment on the ERA from SM module to the MLM module,” he added, referring to Russia’s Zvezda Service Module and Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module. It was the first-ever time that two cosmonauts were transported simultaneously between modules using the ERA, and the experience stood out for Fadyaev, who skillfully handled the robotic arm’s controls.
Adenot pointed to the second of her two spacewalks as a point of pride during what is her first mission to space. She and Menon spent the majority of their Aug. 18 EVA removing a failed Space-to-Ground Antenna (SGANT) on the station’s Z1 truss, but stuck bolts and electrical connectors ate up so much time that they had to defer installing the spare until Aug. 25. Adenot recalled her relief when engineering teams on the ground confirmed the new SGANT’s functionality. “After two EVAs trying to fix it with Anil, it was a great thing to hear,” she said.
The Crew-12 astronauts also discussed some of the science they’ve helped carry out during their time on orbit. One of Hathaway’s proudest moments came when he heard the celebrations from teams in mission control over ISS communications channels after the crew completed upgrades to the station’s Cold Atom Lab, which facilitates quantum mechanics experiments.
“We spent, it must have been two or three hours trying to figure out how to get this part to fit into the slide it was supposed to fit in,” Hathaway said. “Hearing the cheers … over the space-to-ground loops when we finally got it properly installed and it was ready to do science was a pretty fun moment for me.”
Some of Meir’s favorite experiments took place in the Life Sciences Glovebox, including investigations involving neocartilage and stem cells. “Previous experiments have shown that the stem cells actually divide for longer, more continuously, in microgravity than they do on Earth,” Meir said. “So potentially that's something very novel that was discovered. And potentially, if it becomes cost-effective, we could produce stem cells up here to be used for targeted therapies back on Earth.”
As for what they’re looking forward to once they return to Earth, the answer is pretty much everything. “One of the things about living in space is, it's an expeditionary lifestyle,” Hathaway said. “We don't have a lot of selection of food. We don't have running water … So going home and being able to take a nice long hot shower will be very relaxing and very nice. And of course, I'm looking forward to seeing my family. But a hot shower is near the top of my list.”
Adenot, too, has her mind in the water. “I love water sports,” she said. “We don't have a lot of variety of sports [aboard the ISS], and obviously we don't have water sports. So I'm looking forward to these.”
“What I'm looking forward to most is seeing my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter,” Meir said, and added a few more things to her list. “I'm so looking forward to seeing nature again,” she said, “feeling the breeze on my face, the wind rustling through the leaves, experiencing all those things that we don't have up here. But I will very, very much miss being weightless all the time and the incredible views that we have.”
