KENNEDY SPACE CENTER — After spending nearly six months onboard the International Space Station, the four members of Crew-7 has officially undocked from the floating laboratory and are ready to head home to Earth in a splash down.

Countdown to splashdown

Crew-7 crewmates NASA astronaut Commander Jasmin Moghbeli, European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut and pilot Andreas Mogensen, and mission specialists Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov will be onboard SpaceX’s Dragon space capsule named Endurance have begun their commute home by undocking from the ISS’s Harmony module at 11:20 a.m. ET, Monday, stated NASA.  

It was supposed to be at 11:05 a.m. ET. They were in the Dragon and belted in since before 9:15 a.m. ET.

“After performing a series of departure burns to move away from the space station, Dragon will conduct multiple orbit-lowering maneuvers, jettison the trunk, and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere for splashdown off the coast of Florida almost 19 hours later …,” SpaceX explained.

The Dragon will be fully autonomous from the moment it undocks to the splashdown, yet the crew can take control of it if needed.

And that commute home will be something else. Using a series of parachute deployments, the Dragon will slow down from an orbital speed of about 17,500 mph (2,816 kph) to 350 mph (482 kph) to about 16 mph (25 kph) once it softly lands off the coast of Florida.

And going at those speeds before the splashdown means that people across the Sunshine State may hear a sonic boom.

Learn all about sonic booms here.

The splashdown is set to happen around 5:47 a.m. ET, Tuesday, stated NASA. It was set for 5:50 a.m. ET.

The Crew-7 mission lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on Aug. 26, 2023.

Last week, Crew-8 arrived at the ISS and the crews got to spend a little time together. 

Watch the splashdown

Follow the Dragon to splashdown