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A NASA spokesperson said that this Dragon, launched to the ISS on the Commercial Resupply Services 33 (CRS-33) mission “will undock in late January 2026, before splashing down and returning critical science and hardware to teams on Earth.”
“Station has sufficient capability for reboost and attitude control, and there are no expected impacts to this capability,” a spokesperson said on Thursday.
As for crew capabilities, it’s unclear how much the Site 31 pad damage will delay the launch of the Soyuz MS-29 mission, if at all.
A July 2025 press release from NASA announcing its astronaut, Anil Menon, as a crew member stated that the Soyuz MS-29 mission would launch in June 2026.
However, on Thursday, aspokesperson for the agency said the mission “has always been scheduled to launch in July 2026.
As for U.S. crewed missions, the SpaceX Crew-12 mission is the next up to bat after NASA confirmed that the next flight of a Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft (Starliner-1) would be a cargo-only mission.
Starliner may carry crew on its next voyage, but that depends on the outcome of the Starliner-1 mission.
Sketching the future
In these final five years, NASA and its partners will begin winding down station operations and in the immediate years before its demise, the station will be slowly lowered using orbital drag and the station’s thrusters over the course of two to two-and-a-half years, according to Dana Weigel, ISS Program Manager, during a post-launch Crew-11 briefing.
“The Russian segment is prime for doing all of that. So, all of the attitude control, debris avoidance, anything we do with actively lowering is from the Russian segment,” Weigel said.
“Once we get down to the point of actually deorbiting, our current plan is to have the Russian segment do attitude control and the USDV do actual thrusting and boost,” she added.
“That gives us additional layers of redundancy, so that if something happened with the attitude control, you can then switch over to the USDV. So, it’s very much an integrated plan and an integrated solution.”
One way that delays to future Progress vehicle launches may impact the station is also in stocking up on fuel for those future lowering burns as well as attitude control.
“Part of what Roscosmos is working on right now is fuel delivery. So, we’ve got to get the fuel reserves on station to the point where they can do their portions of this,” Weigel said in early August.
“Latest predictions are that will probably be at the right level in early 2028 and we’ll probably start drifting down in mid-2028. We’ve got to make sure we have the fuel there and everyone’s ready to go. And then the USDV will arrive mid-2029.”
As for the crews onboard, assuming the current schedule holds, the final years onboard station may look something like the following:
Feb. 2026 – SpaceX Crew-12
July 2026 – Soyuz MS-29
Oct. 2026 – SpaceX Crew-13 or Starliner-2
March 2027 – Soyuz MS-30
June 2027 – Dragon or Starliner
Nov. 2027 – Soyuz MS-31
Feb. 2028 – Dragon or Starliner
July 2028 – Soyuz MS-32
Oct. 2028 – Dragon or Starliner
March 2029 – Soyuz MS-33
June 2029 – Dragon or Starliner
Nov. 2029 – Soyuz MS-34
Feb. 2030 – Dragon or Starliner
Asked whether NASA would want its final crew onboard station to be comprised of seasoned veterans instead of making sure its newest astronauts get flight experience Weigel told Spaceflight Now following the Crew-11 briefing that it’s a complicated question.
“I think there are so many different factors that can work on that. One of the things from a medical consideration standpoint is we do limit radiation exposure for crew members and if we’re asking for a year-long mission, we have to factor all of that in for crew health,” Weigel said.
“So, in an ideal sense, you’d say, ‘Yeah, send me somebody who’s flown, who’s great at spacewalks, this, that and the other.’ But too much experience puts you over the radiation limit.”
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