Nasa sets live coverage for crew-9 splashdown

Late on 17 March 2025, NASA flips the switch on a live feed as the SpaceX Crew-9 preps to bolt from the International Space Station—hatch closure kicks off at 10:45 p.m. EDT. I can see the mission chiefs huddled Sunday, poring over Florida’s coastal forecast, pinning splashdown for 5:57 p.m. Tuesday off Pensacola’s shores. Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos’ Aleksandr Gorbunov are stuffing science hauls from 171 days aloft into the Dragon, their ride home after a marathon that started last September.

The coverage unfolds like a gritty dispatch—NASA+ streams the hatch slam, then undocking at 1:05 a.m. Tuesday, a quiet handoff in the dark. By 5:11 p.m., the deorbit burn flares, and I’m picturing a SpaceX engineer in Hawthorne, chain-smoking through the telemetry, praying the sea stays calm. “It’s all about timing,” Joel Montalbano might growl at the 7:30 p.m. debrief, flanked by Steve Stich and Sarah Walker, as they unpack the plunge for a global crowd glued to X and YouTube.

Out there off Florida, a recovery boat sways, crew peering skyward for that charred capsule—171 days of orbit crashing back to Earth. Since blasting off from Cape Canaveral on 28 September 2024, these four have been lab rats in the void, and now it’s a race against weather creeping in later this week. NASA’s flung the feed wide—Twitch, socials, the works—and it’s raw, unscripted, like a dispatch from the edge. The world’s watching, caught in the hum of reentry.