[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Steve Stitch, Manager for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, Bill Spetsch, Operations Integration Manager for NASA's International Space Station Program, and joining us virtually, Sarah Walker, SpaceX Director for Dragon Mission Management. We'll be taking some questions from here in the room today and on our phone bridge today. So if you're in the room, be sure to get our attention to ask your question. And if you're on the phone bridge, be sure to press star one to enter the queue. Before we get started, though, we'll start with some opening remarks from our panel here. And Joel, we'll start with you.

[00:00:32] Speaker 2: All right. Well, thank you. And thank you, everyone, for being here. And for those of you tying in remotely, thank you for showing an interest in our great space program. It is awesome to have Crew 9 home. Just a beautiful landing. I think many of you heard that back in January, the president asked SpaceX what it would take to bring this crew home. And I will tell you that at the time that that question was asked, we were already looking at options, what to do with the Crew 10, Crew 9 situation, and how we're going to set that up. I'll tell you a little bit. You know, when you plan these dynamic activities, a lot of work goes into them. For example, for the landing that you guys just witnessed today, there's a number of things that we look at, a number of factors, weather being one of them. You saw great weather today. In addition, we look at the readiness of the recovery team to make sure they're ready to go. We look at the handover time on orbit between the incoming crew and the departing crew to make sure there's enough time for activities to be accomplished before the departing crew leaves. We do have the benefit of having NASA astronaut Don Pettit remaining on board. He'll be coming home on Soyuz in April. And so he'll continue the handover with the crew. We also look at the vehicle traffic. The vehicles coming and going. And when you pull all that together, the International Space Station Program, the Commercial Crew Program and SpaceX came up with the plan that we just witnessed. The Crew 10 launch last week, the docking over the weekend, the undock early today, and then the landing that we just witnessed. So just an incredible amount of inputs that you get to pull all that together in order to have a successful operation. I want to tell you, we want to thank the Crew 9 team and the ground teams for their dedication to excellence, their resilience, their flexibility during this expedition. Everything they did to have a successful expedition, as you have all witnessed. SpaceX has been an incredible partner for us. And it shows the benefits of the commercial, public, private partnership that we have. So they've just been a huge, great partner throughout all this. Crew 9, in addition to the spacewalks that many of you witnessed, they performed just about 150 experiments on board the International Space Station with over 900 hours of research. And the work we do on the International Space Station benefits the nation, benefits people on Earth, and are the building blocks for going back to the moon and to Mars. So Nick, Alexander, Butch, and Sonny, welcome home. On behalf of NASA, I want to thank the administration. I want to thank all the work of the NASA teams and all the work of the SpaceX teams. And so with that, I'll hand it over to Commercial Crew Program Manager, Steve Stich.

[00:03:28] Speaker 3: Thanks Joel, and thank you all for being here. Greatly appreciate your interest in the Commercial Crew Program and also human spaceflight. Of course, as you know, it's been just a huge week for Commercial Crew. You know, the missions, I think, sometimes seem easier than they are. If I just step back and think about all the challenges we had to launch Crew 9, moving to a different launch pad, adjusting the seats and the crew training, and then, you know, over the weekend, once we docked Crew 10 safely, looking at the weather patterns, finding this great opportunity that we landed at today, adjusting the timeline. You know, it's never easy. Spaceflight's always dynamic. Sometimes it seems like things move from step to step to step, but there's usually different paths along the way. So the weekend was culminated today with the landing of Crew 9. We Dragon Splashed down at about 5.57 p.m. off the coast of Tallahassee. That's our first Commercial Crew Program landing at Tallahassee. We've had a couple cargo flights land there. And now it's great to have Crew 9 and the Freedom Capsule back home, and its fourth flight is now in the history books. Of course, we're overjoyed. I watched every crew member come out of the vehicle today post-landing. It was great to watch Nick, Sonny, Butch, and Alexander come out of Dragon and smile and wave as they came out of the vehicle. You know, we'll get them. They're on the ship now. to meet the NASA aircraft and then back to meet with their families. If you watched the weather today, it was incredible. Clear skies, real low winds, maybe three or four knots of wind, and really calm seas. You could see the dolphins swimming around the capsule, which was kind of incredible. SpaceX had a nice drone aircraft flying around and taking footage, and that was just incredible. As I said, the ops team just did a phenomenal job over the weekend pulling in the landing to get the crew home sooner and take advantage of this great weather opportunity. Really appreciate the versatility of SpaceX, the ISS program, commercial crew program, and the flight ops team in planning out the timeline, looking at the crew's workload, determining whether we could pull this off, doing sleep shifting, all those sorts of things that made this an opportunity happen. I also want to thank our partners at the U.S. Coast Guard. They were there on scene protecting the scene and making sure that it was safe for mariners in the area. The FAA, the Department of Defense continuing to support us. You know, it's great to see the teams really in action. Overall, I would say it was a really clean undocking, reentry, and landing. The Dragon vehicle performed extremely well, didn't really have any issues to work. You know, little things, a GPS outage that we reset a filter on and things like that. Today, the sequence went perfectly, we jettisoned the trunk, executed the deorbit burn, closed the nose cone and did the entry. You could hear Nick call down when we finally got the vehicle back through the blackout, 4.6 Gs, and you could tell they were doing well, and then braced for the parachute deploy of the drogues and then the mains and then having splashdown. So parachutes performed well. The whole system worked just as planned. The crew's doing great. You know, they'll spend a little time on the recovery ship getting checked out, making sure that they're healthy and ready to go, and then eventually they'll make their way back to Houston. Again, I want to congratulate the entire NASA Commercial Crew Program, the SpaceX team. You know, in many ways, if I step back to last year, this has been nine months in the making and I couldn't be prouder of our team's versatility, our team's ability to adapt and really build for the future of human spaceflight and looking at different ways to do business, taking advantage of one vehicle to launch a crew and then bring back the crew in a different vehicle. Our partner, SpaceX, did a tremendous job. Every time we asked them to do something a little different, they stepped up and to the plate and did that, including swapping capsules six weeks ago prior to Crew 10 and then also adjusting the Crew 9 mission. You know, we'll celebrate for a while. We're going to take some time in Commercial Crew to celebrate this one and spend a little time with the crew, and then we'll move on to Crew 11. Crew 11 will be here before we know it. We'll launch that vehicle as early as mid-July, so we'll start preparing for that. And then, you know, we're working hand in hand with Boeing as well on certification of Starliner, getting that vehicle back to flight. You know, Butch and Sonny's return on Dragon, to me, shows how important it is to have two different crew transportation systems, the importance of Starliner and the redundancy that we're building in human spaceflight for our low-Earth urban economy. We're super grateful for Boeing as well and their investment. They're keenly interested in the landing today. They have a watch party going on and are watching Butch and Sonny come back. And they've asked, texted me, you know, the buildup to this. They're very keenly interested in Butch and Sonny. And then we're interested in their resilience. That whole Boeing team, like our whole Commercial Crew Program team, is resilient and moving forward to the next steps on Starliner. It's been a busy start to 2025. It's hard to believe. We're in the middle or toward late March, looking for an exciting summer as well. And I look forward to your questions, and I'll hand it over to Bill.

[00:09:00] Speaker 4: All right. Thanks, Steve. Yeah, welcome, and thanks for everybody's interest as we continue on. The launch platform today marks the successful completion of the Crew-9 mission, and really with them handing over operations on board to Crew-10. Just some interesting stats as we go through. Nick and Alexander both spent 171 days in space on this trip, seeing the arrival and departure of four different visiting vehicles to the ISS. Butch and Sonny spent 286 days in space, and they got to see eight different visiting vehicles coming and going from the ISS. We stay really busy as we talk about all these vehicles coming and going from the station. Nick and Butch each conducted one spacewalk, and Sonny conducted two. That actually gave Sonny the record for most time on spacewalks by a woman, and puts her fourth overall in terms of time outside doing spacewalks. The crew contributed to more than 150 unique experiments, like Joel said, including stem cell technology to potentially address blood diseases, autoimmune disorders, and cancers. They tested lighting systems to help maintain circadian rhythms, which will help improve conditions for not only future crews as you go through spaceflight, but also those on the ground for shift workers and those in extreme or remote environments. They did plant growth and quality experiments to support future Moon and Mars missions as we look forward with that. They loaded a really interesting experiment. JAXA had their first wooden satellite. They loaded that into and got that deployed from the ISS. And then as part of their spacewalk, Butch and Sonny collected samples from the station's exterior to study the survivability of microorganisms in the vacuum of space. I'll tell you, the Crew-9 crew did a great job here in the near term supporting this shortened handover period with Crew-10 and enabling that landing opportunity that we saw today. There was a lot of work that they did ahead of Crew-10 arrival to get prepared, and then really working through all of the things that we need to do to hand over the emergency procedures to the crew, to get the cargo transferred that they need to, and to get all the vehicles set up for Crew-10 to be very successful. Crew-10 is already working hard, and they're working on key science investigations on board. They already kicked them off even while they were getting prepped for undocking the other day. So coming up on ISS, we still have a lot going on. We have NG-21 release at the end of March, providing some important trash disposal for the space station. Always, you got to get rid of all the stuff that you bring up, so you got to bring that down somehow, and NG-21 is going to take away a lot of that. And then we'll look forward to Soyuz MS-27 launch Tuesday, April 8th from Baikonur Cosmodrome at about 12.47 a.m. Central. That'll be carrying NASA astronaut Johnny Kim and cosmonauts Sergei Ryzhikov and Alexei Zabritsky. And then before Soyuz MS-26 returns, Alexei Chinin will pass on the role of ISS commander to our JAXA astronaut, Takuya Nishi. Really a lot of great stuff continuing on station. I really appreciate the entirety of the team joint with SpaceX, NASA, our operations team, the program teams, the engineering teams, all the work it takes to turn around these missions. It's a ton of stuff. And then we go change it on them at the last minute, and they handle it like the pros that they are. So welcome home to Crew 9. And with that, I'll hand it over to Sarah.

[00:12:41] Speaker 1: All right. Thanks, Bill.

[00:12:43] Speaker 5: Well, it's a good day to be here at SpaceX, and it's a good day down in Florida as we welcome Crew 9 home from their stay at the International Space Station. We're happy to have safely returned Nick, Alex, Sonny, and Butch back to Earth and to their families after their time at the orbiting laboratory. Human spaceflight is dynamic and exciting, and this crew knows that as well as any other. So back in September, Steve was talking about this a bit, Crew 9 became the first human spaceflight mission to launch from Pad 40 using our new Dragon Tower that we completed construction on last year. And it was our first mission in a while to fly a crew of two since Bob and Doug's historic flight in 2020. So then just three days ago, we launched Crew 10 to take over and continue the work of Crew 9 on ISS. And I forgot to mention this Friday night, but Crew 10 was our 50th Dragon mission since first launching COTS 1 in December of 2010. That's a huge milestone for the team. COTS, if you don't remember, stands for Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. And COTS 1 was the first demonstration mission under that original partnership with NASA to resupply the space station with cargo flights. It was also the mission that inspired me to join the SpaceX team, which I'm so grateful I was given the opportunity to do a few months later. So the rest is history. We've been bringing cargo and more recently crews to the orbiting lab for well over a decade since. And as we talked about a few days ago after Crew 10 launch, NASA and SpaceX adapted as this mission evolved. I appreciate all the kind words said already during this press conference. As we adapted together, we kept safety at the forefront. And thanks to the teamwork across the two agencies, a change in the Dragon spacecraft for Crew 10 and then a shortened handover helped accelerate the Crew 10 launch and the Crew 9 return. Then over the weekend, we decided as a joint team to undock a date earlier than originally planned to take advantage of some great weather we were seeing off the coast of Tallahassee for splashdown. So I know this required quite a bit of creativity from the NASA team and the onboard crew to compress the handover even further than they already had. And I'm thankful for everyone's hard work and flexibility to safely bring Dragon and the crew home today. I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that today's return was also our final Dragon recovery on the East Coast. So after six years of successful recovery operations off the coast of Florida, we will now be moving all Dragon recovery operations back to the West Coast. I just hope the California coast can bring as many dolphins as we saw during today's operation. That was really fun to see. We had a nominal return today. Dragon is healthy and the parachute performed as expected. The crew is likely on the recovery vessel now, soon to transit to the SpaceX NASA handover location while the SpaceX vessel transports Dragon back to our refurbishment facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida. It's amazing to think that SpaceX has now safely flown 62 crew members from 14 countries to space, 52 of those to and from the International Space Station. Dragon has supported 46 missions to the station in all and 29 of those on reflown Dragons. I think that's enough flights that we can be really proud of what the team has built together and what we've accomplished, but always with the humility and awareness that we will continue to learn every single mission. The stakes of getting this right are and always will be high. And as Bill Gerstenmaier often says, we must always stay hungry and vigilant to scour the data before, during and after every operation we perform. It's always an honor for all of us here at SpaceX to launch human spaceflight missions and safely return astronauts and cosmonauts as we continue to advance human spaceflight. Thanks for having me on the briefing today and look forward to your questions.

[00:16:24] Speaker 1: All right. Thank you all for your opening remarks. We will go ahead and start taking some questions in the room. So please raise your hand, Gina. Go ahead.

[00:16:35] Speaker 6: I think this is for Steve Stitch. I mean, Crew 9's home, but the research hasn't stopped because what you need to know about what happened with Butch and Sonny on orbit, that's still an ongoing medical research project. Would you kind of like expand on that for me? What will you learn about their nine months on the space station?

[00:16:55] Speaker 3: Yeah. I think I can comment and then see if Bill has anything to add, but, you know, every single crew member that we fly in orbit, we collect medical research data. We do various blood draws at various times during the flight, especially toward the end, do bone density measurements in space. We look at their vision and how their vision might change over time, their intracranial pressure. We do all kinds of things. So you're right. Every single astronaut, when they come back, including Nick and Alexander's participated in all kinds of experiments, and we're learning from all those, and I'll see if Bill has anything

[00:17:28] Speaker 4: to add. I mean, I think you covered the vast majority of it. We look at everybody when they come home, and every duration adds to that database of knowledge of the effects of space flight on the human body, and so we continue to look at that across all of our crew members.

[00:17:42] Speaker 1: Okay. We'll take another question here in the room. Mark, go ahead.

[00:17:45] Speaker 7: Mark Strassman, CBS News. Steve, I want to pick up on something you said, which is the keen interest in Butch and Sonny. All five major television networks cut in with live special reports following the splashdown because Butch and Sonny have arguably become America's most famous astronauts over the course of their nine-month saga. So now that they're home, now that the saga is over, what to you is the takeaway?

[00:18:11] Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I haven't probably had a lot of time to reflect. You know, we're certainly looking at Starliner very carefully. We're in the process of looking at that vehicle, looking at the helium system. We've got some candidate seals that we're going to replace. We'll get into some testing here over the summer time frame with what we call an integrated doghouse at White Sands. So we're looking at that. You know, the thing I think back of this whole time frame is how really resilient Butch and Sonny were the whole time. I mean, they launched on what was going to be a short test flight with the crew flight test vehicle with Boeing. And then they moved very quickly into station increment operations, and they became seamlessly part of the International Space Station. And they did that because they're experienced astronauts, and we had prepared, right? We had flown gloves for them to do spacewalks, and we had flown a lot of components for them. So I think that shows the adaptability of crew members. If I think forward to exploration and maybe some harsh missions to the Martian surface someday or back to the moon, you know, the adaptability of crew members, changing the timeline for their return, certainly a huge thank you to their families. You know, when you think about Butch and Sonny, they enjoyed their time on station. They got to do spacewalks, and they got to do lots of cool science and things like that. Their families are the ones that really, you know, kudos to them for being resilient in a planned short-duration flight now turning into a long duration. And I think back of when they went into quarantine. They went into quarantine in the April time frame for the early May launch that we had for the crewed flight test. So the families, a huge thank you to them. I'm sure the reunion is going to be wonderful with the families, and we'll keep learning as we go and keep being adaptable in the future.

[00:20:04] Speaker 2: Okay. Let me just add, if it's okay, it shows the flexibility of our commercial providers. The fact that they flew up on the Boeing vehicle and home on SpaceX, this is a lesson learned for NASA, too, such that when we do have Boeing and SpaceX both flying on a regular basis, we need to be able to do the opposite, too. If we come up on a SpaceX vehicle and have a problem bringing people home on a Boeing vehicle, it shows you, you know, this year I think many of you know we celebrate 25 years of crewed on the International Space Station and just shows the flexibility we have with the space station and our commercial partners.

[00:20:42] Speaker 1: We'll take our next question here in the room.

[00:20:43] Speaker 8: Go ahead. Hi. My name is Kevin Darrow with CNN. Two questions. Do you have specifics on the timeline of when the astronauts will be landing back here in Houston and reuniting with their family over the next, I'm presuming, the next few hours? And then secondly, the more delicate question is, of all the talk that we've seen over the last months that these astronauts have been, quote, stranded in space, how did that kind of talk affect you guys over the last few months in formulating a plan to get them back home?

[00:21:12] Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't have the specifics of the timeline. I know they're going to fly back here tonight. They'll probably spend some time rehabilitating a little bit and the docs watching them and then they'll rejoin their families in the next, you know, day or so. You know, relative to the mission planning, I think what we did was we tried to look for opportunities to bring the crew back when it was safe to do so and, you know, we always had a lifeboat, a way for them to come home all the way back to Starliner. If you remember during the Starliner crewed flight test mission, we said if there were emergency during part of that mission, we considered the thrusters, the service module thrusters good enough to bring the crew back then. We then transitioned to the Crew 8 vehicle for a temporary timeframe until Crew 9 arrived. So we always had a way to get the crew home safely should we need to. And then it really became when is the right time? When is the right time to bring them back? And then when we had to swap over Dragon capsules from the new vehicle, which wasn't quite ready, we moved to capsule 210. We figured this March timeframe was the timeframe to execute this direct handover that we just did. So for me, it's been the normal kind of planning I do all the time, looking at all the options, working with SpaceX, working with the space station program, and finding the right time to bring the crew back.

[00:22:29] Speaker 1: Thank you. Okay. We'll take another question here in the room. Hi, guys.

[00:22:33] Speaker 9: My name is Amanda Henderson. I'm with KHOU11, the CBS affiliate here in Houston. Ten days turning into nine months, but turning also into hundreds of hours of invaluable research that they got up there at the ISS and also moonwalk hours. Can you talk a little bit about how when you realized that they were going to be up there for longer than the intended timeframe, they were able to transition into getting that invaluable research started?

[00:23:02] Speaker 4: Yeah, I can start with that one, and I can let these guys add in. So even before they launched, because we knew they were flying on a test mission, we provided all the training for the stay on ISS that they would need to be a long-duration crew member. We flew the equipment. Every crew has unique equipment that they need to do a spacewalk, and we made sure we had that up there. So I think it really comes to the preparation that we did even before they flew that allows them to be so successful when they get up there. And that's really what we do with all of the crews that fly to the ISS. There's the rigorous training program that they go through. They're prepared for things. They have a lot of skills-based training that goes on so that they know how to do the basics of everything, and then we have an outstanding team on the ground working with them. They get to work directly with the scientists in a lot of cases on experiments that help walk them through what they're doing, video downlinks. We have a lot of different ways to kind of help them through, and it really just enables everything that they then do on board in an effective manner. But it all starts with that preparation that we did ahead of time, knowing that we have a test mission coming.

[00:24:11] Speaker 3: I do think the difference, like, the shuttle missions had a finite duration. The way the space shuttle worked, it had fuel cells, and they used liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen to power those fuel cells. And so at some point, that vehicle had to return. But the beauty of the space station is wonderful laboratory, wonderful place for the astronauts to live and work, and you can almost stop the clock if you have a problem. And I think that's something that we learned on this flight that's a little bit different is, so when Starliner, we had planned for maybe a short 10- to two-week mission for a test flight, when we needed more time, we took that time to understand the vehicle. And then when we determined that the better option would be to bring Butch and Sonny back on Dragon, you know, we pivoted over to that plan. So I think station gives us that flexibility that we never had before. And we also have flexibility now, as Joel said, with two different vehicles, so someday there may be a case where we're using Starliner to handle a Dragon contingency problem of some sort. So we have a luxury that maybe we didn't have in the past, and so we're adapting and learning from that.

[00:25:17] Speaker 1: All right. We'll head over to our phone bridge to Marsha Dunn with the Associated Press. Hi.

[00:25:23] Speaker 10: Yes. Good evening. Probably for you, Steve. I understand the crew is being flown to Houston tonight and that they'll be staying at JSC in crew quarters. When will they be able to go home if they're feeling good? How much time off do they get before they have to go back to work? Are you giving them some extra bonus vacation? And when do you have to decide whether Starliner is going to be carrying Crew 12 up? What's the deadline for deciding on that mission, whether it'll be Starliner or Dragon? Thanks.

[00:25:56] Speaker 3: Yeah. My questions are, I hope I get all of them. Let's see. The first question was, when do they go back to their families? It's usually within a day or two once they're cleared medically that we make sure, you know, as they re-adapt to gravity here on Earth, it's usually a day or two they'll go back to their families. And then, you know, they'll get some time off and then we'll have – we've done a lot of – fortunately with Butch and Sonny, we've done a lot of debriefs already with them. And so we've gotten feedback on Starliner and feedback on many things for the crewed flight test already from them while they were on orbit. They'll have a standard set of debriefs with the Crew 9 crew because they really have been part of Crew 9 ever since Crew 9 docked. So they'll go through a series of debriefs and then – but they will get some well-deserved time off, well-deserved time with their families. It's been a long time for them and look forward to hearing their stories about meeting with their family. I think the last question, Marcia, was what – when do we have to decide Crew 12 versus the next step with Starliner? And we probably have a little bit more time as we get into the summer and understand the testing we're going to go do to make that decision, whether it be Crew 12 as the next flight or Starliner. You know, we're also looking at some options for Starliner. Should we need to of flying it uncrewed? The vehicle has the capability to fly uncrewed if we need to. And so we'll kind of weigh all those things as we get the testing and analysis behind us. Boeing's done a good job of developing a new thermal model, which we're using to try to understand the changes we're going to make in those dock houses. We'll add some tape and thermal barriers in different places. So we have a little time to make that decision.

[00:27:37] Speaker 1: Okay. Our next question is from Chris Davenport with The Washington Post. Hey, everyone.

[00:27:45] Speaker 11: Thanks for taking my question and congrats on a successful end to the mission for Steve Stitch. You had mentioned your discussions with Boeing. And I'm just wondering, has Boeing given you a 100 percent commitment that they are sticking with the program, just given the enormous cost they've had to eat? And is NASA doing anything to incentivize them to stay? You just mentioned an uncrewed flight, for example.

[00:28:11] Speaker 1: Thanks.

[00:28:13] Speaker 3: Yeah, Boeing, all the way up to their new CEO, Kelly, has been committed to Starliner. I can see that in the way they're approaching their solution to the problems. They're taking the time to understand the leaks we had in the helium system and testing some new seals that we may field in those flanges. The same thing with the test plans that are multifaceted for the thrusters, some testing of the Teflon material, testing, integrated testing at White Sands. So I see them being very committed. They want to provide a transportation system with crew capability to fulfill their missions. And then they're even, I think, stepping beyond that and thinking about low Earth orbit and commonly-owned destinations with their vehicles. So I see a commitment from Boeing to continue the program. They realize that they have an important vehicle. And we're very close to having a capability that we would like to field. I think we have some changes we need to make to the way we heat those thrusters, the way we fire those thrusters. And then we can test that on the next flight.

[00:29:24] Speaker 1: Our next question is from Ken Chang with The New York Times. Hi. Thank you.

[00:29:29] Speaker 12: This is for Joel, Steve, and Sarah. The White House put out a statement that said the landing today representing President Trump keeping his promise to rescue the astronauts stranded in space. And from what you just said during this news conference, I think it's been in the words for a month, and it's a lot of work for everyone, I was just wondering, could you explicitly answer the question, if Kamala Harris were president or if Joe Biden had won the election and won, would anything have changed with this mission? Thank you.

[00:30:09] Speaker 2: You know, so, you know, NASA is an agency. We work for the president. And who's ever there, we work for them. We had an input from that office. We took a look at it. And, you know, our job is to take all the inputs we get and operate as successful and safely as we can. And that's what we would do for this administration, and that's what we would do for any administration.

[00:30:36] Speaker 1: Our next question is from Sana with Bloomberg News. Hi.

[00:30:41] Speaker 13: Thank you so much for taking my question. I had another question regarding Boeing. I know you just mentioned that you're looking at options for an uncrewed mission. So I guess we're wondering, who would pay for the uncrewed mission, and would Boeing be required to redo the crewed test flight as well? Thanks.

[00:31:06] Speaker 3: Yeah, what we're looking at right now is we really want what I would call is a crewed capable vehicle. So even if we were to fly the vehicle without a crew in the return back to the next steps on with Starliner, we want that to be crewed capable. So we want it to have all the systems in place that we could fly a crew with. In fact, you know, as I think about it, it might be there for a contingency situation as we prepare for whatever events could happen. And one of the things that I've learned in my time at NASA is always be prepared for the unexpected, always have options. And so that's what we're thinking about. So we'll take those steps forward, we'll look at the test data, we'll make a decision whether to fly it crewed or uncrewed. And then, you know, we are trying to do it under what we call this post-certification phase of the contract. And Boeing has delivered a lot of the certification data already. They have a little bit more to go relative to the prop system. I think we talked about they're flying a new space suit eventually and a few other things like that. So we're looking at doing it under that phase of the contract and NASA meeting its commitments on those flights.

[00:32:21] Speaker 1: Our next question is from Will Robinson-Smith with Spaceflight Now. Hi.

[00:32:26] Speaker 14: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us today and congrats on the splashdown of Crew-9.

[00:32:34] Speaker 15: Maybe just following up on Ken's question to Joel and Stitch and Sarah, obviously, as you've discussed tonight and over the last several months, the plan has been, you know, established for some time on how to bring Butch and Sunny back to Earth. But, you know, barring them returning on the seats that were added on the Crew-8 Dragon spacecraft, had the decision been made to try to bring them back any earlier, was there a Dragon spacecraft that would have been available to operate that mission prior to the Dragon that we just saw support the launch of Crew-10? Thanks.

[00:33:16] Speaker 3: Yeah, the earliest Dragon that we had to go fly the mission really was this capsule, Crew-210. And so when we were planning originally on Crew-10 to have the newer spacecraft, we thought it would be ready. Initially, we were going to launch in mid-February. We moved it to March 25th, and then I think Sarah talked briefly before about some of the challenges we had, or maybe it was Mr. Gerstenmaier, with a battery system that was a bad component. We had to pull off. We had to pull the heat shield off and vector out of some work on the vehicle. We had some challenges with some valves in the prop system. And this, to me, is just evidence of how complicated. I don't think we always do a super good job of explaining how complicated the spacecraft itself is made up of millions of components that have to work in an integrated fashion. And you go through testing and qualification to get there. And so those components didn't work. And when we looked at that, we just pivoted over to the vehicle that was going to be ready the soonest, which was Capsule-210, and that led us to the March 12th date and then eventually the March 15th launch.

[00:34:29] Speaker 5: Our next. Yeah. And maybe I would just add that with, you know, with five Crew Dragon spacecraft in the fleet, certainly many paths are possible, right? With the allocations as we had them with our current slate of missions in the next 12 to 18 months, exactly as Steve said, it was the new spacecraft that was anticipated to be ready first with the one we ended up flying shortly on the heels. And then when we ran into a processing issue on that new vehicle, the other one could be ready sooner. And so those were the two that were coming available, but certainly we can pivot and adapt. Flexibility is the name of the game, right? And so if we change what lanes or what stage of the flow any given spacecraft is in, we can open up other options available, but we had these vehicles allotted to or allocated to specific missions, and these were the two spacecraft that met the need that we had here in the spring to fly these missions in the timeframes that they were requested.

[00:35:29] Speaker 1: All right. Our next question is from Joey Roulette. Hey, thanks.

[00:35:35] Speaker 16: Just two questions, one quick one for Steve. I just want to be clear. So it sounds like the testing results that you guys are going to have with Starliner this summer and maybe later on is going to determine whether its next mission is uncrewed or crewed, and whatever that next crewed mission is, is that going to be like a routine certification crewed mission, or might there be another CFT? And then the second question is for Bill Specht. I was just wondering if there's any studies that Bush and Sonny are involved in that investigates the behavioral or psychological kind of response to not just long duration space flight, but unexpected changes to a mission in the middle of it. Thanks.

[00:36:21] Speaker 3: Yeah, when we look back at the crewed flight test, we got a lot of good data out of that flight relative to having a crew on board. So really the thing that we need to solidify and go test is the prop system and the service module. We need to make sure we can eliminate the helium leaks, eliminate the service module thruster issues that we had on docking, and then, you know, the rest of the vehicle performed really well. So when we look forward, what we would like to do is one flight and then get into a crewed rotation flight. So the next flight up would really test all the changes we're making to the vehicle. And then the next flight beyond that, we really need to get Boeing into a crewed rotation. So that's kind of the strategy.

[00:37:04] Speaker 4: Yeah. And then to your second question, you know, all of our crew members go through evaluations. They fill out surveys. They do medical evals. So all of these things happen on every crew member. So we do get some unique data from Butch and Sonny based on their stay, but it's something that we do with every crew member that flies. There's always changes that happen on board. There's always adjustments that we have to make that all of the crew members adapt to. As you've watched with our flight schedule over the years, it's very rare that we actually get a flight to fly exactly where we planned it two years out when they were thinking it was going to be. So it's OK that we have these changes and they adapt really well. But everybody gets kind of looked at in terms of those effects and understanding just the effects of spaceflight on them.

[00:37:54] Speaker 1: OK. Our next question is from Maria with KBIR Knoxville. Hi.

[00:38:00] Speaker 17: Yes. Thank you so much for your time. If someone can walk me through the physical and mental adjustments that the astronauts are going to be experiencing.

[00:38:14] Speaker 3: I can try and see if Bill and Joel have anything to add. You know, when they get back, the body is an amazing, amazingly adaptable. The one thing that the body will struggle a bit with is the inner ear and the vestibular response in microgravity when you transition from 1G here that we're sitting in this room to then in space, the inner ear can get a little disturbed because gravity is not pulling the fluid down and the little hairs inside the inner ear. And so the crew can take a little while to adapt to microgravity. That same thing happens in reverse when you land back on Earth. The human body was adaptable and was used to being in microgravity. Now the body, the vestibular response is such that you feel disoriented. You may feel a little dizzy. You may have trouble getting up. And then, of course, physically, their body, you know, when they were operating in space and doing operations inside the various modules, their muscles weren't working as hard. Their heart wasn't working as hard. And so there's a muscular and cardiovascular kind of reconditioning that has to happen. And so that's what's going happening now. And then, you know, there's a little bit of response back coming back to 1G in space. I could let this pin, release this pin, and it's going to stay right where it is. And, you know, in 1G, if I drop, if I release the pin, it falls. And so there's a little bit of that that the crew has to get back and learn the skills back here on Earth again.

[00:39:51] Speaker 1: Okay. Our next question is from Jackie with The Times of London. Hello. Thank you.

[00:39:59] Speaker 18: I'm sorry if this is a really frustrating question because I know there's so much good work done on this mission, but there has been a fictitious narrative woven around it by prominent people who are hard to ignore. Why has NASA not pushed back more emphatically against that and against the use of astronauts by one of its commercial contractors as political pawns? And what's to be lost by simply correcting that narrative for the sake of the public who have paid for the mission? Thank you.

[00:40:33] Speaker 2: You know, I would say, you know, our job at NASA is to successfully and safely fly these missions. We fly it with the laws of physics, and we fly it with our commercial partners. And so oftentimes there may be things out in the press that may not be exactly what's happening, and our job is to fly these missions. And regardless of what you read in the press, our job is to fly successful missions, safe missions, and do the science we do on board the International Space Station. You know, I mentioned this year, 25 years of continuous crew presence on board later this year, the International Space Station. And we do about 150 experiments every expedition we fly. So think about it. I think we're over 3,000 experiments since we started the International Space Station, and that's what we focus on.

[00:41:36] Speaker 1: Okay. Our next question is from Jeff Faust with Space News.

[00:41:41] Speaker 19: Good evening. Question for Bill or Steve. Since the Crew 9, Crew 10 handover lasted only a couple of days, was there anything you would normally do on a handover you weren't able to do in this case? And then in the future, might you consider short handovers between future commercial crew missions? Thanks.

[00:42:01] Speaker 4: Yeah. Across the board, the main thing that we have to get done is, like, any time you get to a new place is the emergency briefings. Where do I go in case of an emergency? What are my duties in terms of an emergency? And that happens very early on. And then the follow-ons are more of the general, hey, where did you guys put this thing? Or where did you put that? Or where did you leave this wrench when you get up there? Because you can imagine the size of the space station is so large, and there's a lot of stuff up there. So a lot of the handover that we do with the crews is more set up to be an efficiency gain. And that really helps them be more effective when they go and get the tasks done that we need to. So when we reduce that time, we reduce that efficiency in the near term to accomplish the tasks on board. We evaluate that each time and understand what our handover is. In general, we don't look to reduce that, because we want to be as efficient as possible. We want to get everything done in the most efficient manner, get the most things done on space station that we can. But in this case, it was actually to our advantage to go work that shorter handover and then get them home as quicker, hitting this weather day that we had here today, and not leave it up to how the weather was going to behave days from now. So the critical stuff always gets done, that emergency handover, that how do we go handle contingencies on board. They're trained on the ground for all of these things. And we have a lot of support for the teams on the ground to help them as they go. So we can shorten it if we want to, but it's not quite the same as getting up there and finding out from the person that's been up there for six months, hey, I found that this was the best spot to put this, or I left this here. And so when you need it, go look over there to go do this, or this is the best way to go pull out this drawer or whatever you have to do for your experiments on board. So nothing beats that face-to-face handover and the time they get up there. But we have the options to shorten it when it makes the most sense.

[00:44:16] Speaker 1: Okay. Our next question is from Sawyer with nasaspaceflight.com.

[00:44:23] Speaker 20: Thank you so much. This question is, I believe, for Sarah. With this being the final splashdown on the East Coast of the United States, what is the plan for Megan? Is that going to be repurposed to the West Coast? Is that going to stay on the East Coast? And then what becomes the contingency if, for example, the weather isn't good at the planned Pacific landing sites, whereas here you had the Gulf and the Atlantic?

[00:44:47] Speaker 5: Hey, yeah, I – we don't know the answer yet to what will happen, what will become of Megan. We've got Shannon here on the West Coast. I'm sitting here in California right now. And there's unique benefits and unique challenges of weather patterns on the West Coast versus the East Coast. Just one example, we have far more stable weather in terms of wind and wave – wind speed, wave height than we did in Florida. So where we needed numerous sites on both coasts of Florida to provide geographic diversity, to avoid weather patterns that may be happening in one area and not another, not so much the case in – on the West Coast. However, our cloud cover is different here than in Florida. And so things like the airborne assets that support our mission might have different challenges out here than over there. So we've done a lot of trying to learn from meteorologists and historical weather patterns and then figure out the right number of sites and the right number of support assets to ensure that we maintain a high return availability, which means a high percentage of days that would be a viable return option with a safe splashdown, regardless of what coast we're splashing down on.

[00:46:01] Speaker 1: All right. Our next question is from Esam with AFP. If you're talking, we can't hear you.

[00:46:18] Speaker 21: Oh, sorry about that. I was on mute. A couple of quick questions. Steve, you mentioned that they'd be released to their families in a day or two, but they're still going to be going through with rehabilitation for quite a while, right, if you could discuss that? And the other – second question is just a bit broader to follow on from some of my colleagues. As Steve confirmed that Crew 10 was the designated mission that this could happen, could you help us sort of square that circle with praising the administration for accelerating the timeline? How concretely – just to follow up on my colleague's question, how concretely can the administration be credited with accelerating the recovery when the plan hasn't fundamentally changed here? It's just something that we're having a little bit of trouble understanding. Thank you.

[00:47:06] Speaker 3: Yeah. I'll talk the rehabilitation and let Joel talk about the other questions. Rehabilitation will continue. There's a sequence of exercises that they do to try to regain their physical strength over a number of weeks. It's a pretty standard protocol that they go through post-landing to recover. It's well-documented and well-practiced, and the docs and the trainers that do this work will kind of follow each crew member, whether it be Butch and Sonny or the others. You know, we talk about Butch and Sonny because they had a nine-month stay, but the others had, you know, a 171-day stay or so, which is pretty typical of what we've had. And I'll let Joel handle the other questions.

[00:47:52] Speaker 2: And so you were asking the input from the administration. So I think Ken Bowersack said it well the other day. It excited the system, right? It gave us some energy in the system. But the other input was to do this successfully and safely. And that's why I talked about all the different inputs that you get. We got the input from the White House, but you also have to look at the vehicle readiness. We talked about looking at weather. We talked about recovery team handover, the vehicle traffic going to and from the International Space Station. So when you put all that together, we came up with, I thought, a pretty good plan that the teams executed over the last four or five days.

[00:48:32] Speaker 1: All right.

[00:48:33] Speaker 22: We'll take the next question here in the room. I'm Anne Darlene Ferris with Fox 26 Houston. I was just wondering if any of the experiments or tasks, was there anything that was able to be done due to the unexpected extra manpower with them on board that wouldn't have, like, a benefit to having the extra people?

[00:48:57] Speaker 4: So we, once Crew 9 arrived and Crew 8 departed, we were at our normal crew level. So we managed within the normal kind of cadence that we did there. But before that, we absolutely took advantage of Butch and Sonny being there and having the extra hands. We had some maintenance activities that had to be done over the summer that would have potentially taken away from some of the science that we were doing that we didn't have to take away from that time because of the fact that we had the extra hands there. So it was great having them there over the summer as extra hands to help out with a number of activities going on.

[00:49:34] Speaker 1: Okay. We'll take our next question here in the room.

[00:49:38] Speaker 7: This may be premature, but initial reports from the recovery ship just about their condition and how they're doing, has anybody heard?

[00:49:47] Speaker 3: I haven't heard anything specifically from the recovery team. But just in looking at the way as they came out of Dragon, they all looked very healthy. You could tell they all looked like they were feeling about normal for the landing and recovery phase where their body's trying to readapt. So yeah, I haven't heard any reports of anything other than that they're doing well.

[00:50:11] Speaker 2: I saw a lot of smiling and waving.

[00:50:13] Speaker 3: Yes.

[00:50:14] Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. Okay. Our next question is from Ellen with the DailyMail.com. Hi.

[00:50:20] Speaker 23: Thank you guys so much for taking our questions tonight. This question is for Joel. Mary Wilmore's daughter spoke out on social media and blamed politics and negligence for her dad's delayed return. We know that President Trump and Elon Musk both said the previous administration didn't want to bring the Starliner crew back for political reasons. Can you comment on these claims?

[00:50:41] Speaker 2: Yeah. So I wasn't involved in any conversations with the previous administration. It was clear we have a request from the current administration. And the results you saw is what we saw today with the landing of crew nine.

[00:50:58] Speaker 1: Okay.

[00:50:59] Speaker 9: We'll take our next question here in the room. Have you guys gotten a chance to talk with the families of Butch and Sonny? I mean, I'm sure just being able to see them wave and smile today is a huge relief for them, but they've been in quarantine and up in space for almost a year. How are they feeling with everything?

[00:51:19] Speaker 3: I haven't talked personally to the families, but I know the astronauts have a great support system. In other words, they're able to effectively FaceTime with their family and keep in touch with their family. You know, I'm sure Butch is looking forward and Sonny both coming, Easter's coming up and there's graduations coming up and there's lots of family activities coming up that the timing's probably pretty good for. So I haven't had a chance to talk to the family.

[00:51:48] Speaker 2: I guess they had bigger smiles than the crew members. Yes.

[00:51:51] Speaker 1: Yes. Okay. Our next question is from Mike with space.com.

[00:51:56] Speaker 24: Thank you, guys. Yeah, this is probably for Sarah. Just yeah. Yeah. I was just wondering, like, were there any different approaches that you guys took with this dragon to kind of meet this faster deadline or this and if there were, if there are any kind of changes to the processing, like, are there things you can take into future missions?

[00:52:21] Speaker 5: Hey, no changes to the processing and actually, if you're able to go back and listen to Friday night's briefing, I think Steve also shared a little more detail about that. But similar process. It's just a matter of doing a little bit of Tetris within our facilities of what vehicles are going into what tests or what operations in the prelaunch processing flow first. So we certainly did that. There's a few items of hardware within the vehicle that are unique to the specific crew flying. For example, we have small, medium, and large seat buckets installed in each of the four locations and then custom foam for each individual to further customize their experience. And so there was a little bit of just doing the tally on the unique hardware and making sure it was all okay to be used for this mission, but nothing unique to the actual processing flow itself.

[00:53:21] Speaker 1: Okay. Our next question is from Carolyn with Fortune Magazine.

[00:53:26] Speaker 25: Thank you very much and congratulations. I'm wondering, can you share a little more how Sunny and Butch handled kind of the switch mentally for the nine-month mission besides being very resilient? What advice can you give the rest of us lonely humans when we encounter challenging circumstances? And then maybe just talk a little more about the principle repercussions with respect to radiation effects on the heart and cornea, that kind of thing, and how we go about planning to protect against that when we think about missions like tomorrow and extended stay. Thanks.

[00:54:07] Speaker 2: I can start and then the other guys could ask. Before an astronaut flies, we talk to the crew, the crew members are talked to about extending. Hey, you may be assigned for a six-month mission or an eight-day mission in this case, and you may be extended. Frank Rubio was an example, right? Mark Vande Hei was an example. So this isn't the first time that people are flown. Clearly their mission was much shorter than those other missions, but the crew members are talked about, hey, what would you do if you had to be up there for a year? So they mentally prepare before they launch, and they talk to the other crew members that have flown for these long-duration missions. And so the teams are preparing. We do different things on the ground. If you're there a little longer than normal, maybe you'll have some extra family conference times or maybe a half day off after a certain amount of time on orbit. And so we had experience from past crew members, and we made changes in the operations and how we do that. And so let's see, Bill, if you want to add anything to that.

[00:55:10] Speaker 4: Yeah. I think the other question was really on kind of the effects of space on people in general and when you change the duration on them. We look at every crew member when they're going up and making sure that we feel confident, even if their mission had to be extended, that they're up for it and that they've got, I think, the time allowable, I think, for them to stay in space and to go through that. We have a lot of, we monitor everything on board. We keep an eye on things like radiation. We keep an eye on things like solar activity that can affect that. We keep an eye on the rest of the environmental factors on board, whether it be the carbon dioxide levels, the CO2 levels, you know, the contaminants that we have on board. We have scrubbers and filters and things that take that out. So we do all the things that we would normally do to manage that for crew and minimize their exposure to anything that could be considered harmful. And then we limit the times to the best of our ability that we can up there.

[00:56:13] Speaker 1: Our next question is from Marsha Smith with SpacePolicyOnline.com. Thanks so much.

[00:56:19] Speaker 26: Steve, you mentioned that Crew 11 might launch as early as July, which seems like a pretty short interval for Crew 10 to be up there. Could you talk about what's driving you to launch as early as July? And will either of the astronauts who are bumped from Crew 9 be on Crew 11, Stephanie Wilson or Zina Cardman? And which capsule will they be flying?

[00:56:45] Speaker 3: Let's see. The timing for that mission right now, you know, originally we were going to fly that mission. If you look at historically, our rotations have been in February and August. There is a particular SpaceX cargo flight, CRS-33, that has the ability to do some reboost for the space station. And that needs to fly in that late August, early September time frame. And so we moved our handover up. That boost trunk is what we call it, will be there for a large part of the fall time frame. So to get all the propellant used on that mission. So that's why we looked at moving it up. Right now we think we'll fly probably the capsule 206, which is our fleet leader. It'll be on its sixth flight. We'll continue to work that with SpaceX. You have to remember with space station, one of the critical consumables is docking ports. We have two of those docking ports. And so once we fly that CRS-33 mission with the boost trunk, one of those docking ports will be tied up for an extended duration. And you know we like to do this direct handover. We like to ensure the new vehicle is there, the new crew is there, before we undock the astronauts that have been there for the increment in progress. And so when you put all that together, it drove us to look at right now, mid to late July. Things can change over time. But that's kind of what we're looking at. We'll kind of pivot over to that once we complete the debriefs for crew 10.

[00:58:26] Speaker 1: Our next question is from Will Robinson-Smith with Spaceflight Now. Hi.

[00:58:32] Speaker 27: I'm taking a question from this. Question is, when I took the comment you made earlier in this brief, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that there was another look that needed to be taken at the plug for those flying boats. Can you tell us that it may need to be changed and the reason for that? Thanks.

[00:59:00] Speaker 1: Did you get that?

[00:59:01] Speaker 3: I couldn't. I'm sorry.

[00:59:03] Speaker 1: You're coming in a little bit. It's breaking up a little bit. Can you please try to repeat your question? Operator, if you could please unmute the participant. Will, if you're talking, we can't hear you.

[00:59:29] Speaker 21: Can you hear me?

[00:59:32] Speaker 1: Yep. We can hear you now.

[00:59:34] Speaker 21: Perfect. I'm sorry. We keep losing you.

[00:59:37] Speaker 1: If you could just follow up with us after this news conference, we'll be happy to get a response over to you from the panel up here. But for now, that'll do it for our press conference this evening. Once again, Crew 9 is safely back on Earth. And as always, you can follow NASA and all of our missions on nasa.gov. Thanks for joining. We'll see you next time. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology