Four Crew-12 members were preparing to leave the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft under a return plan spanning roughly 27 hours. The published sequence began with farewells and hatch closure, continued through autonomous undocking, and was intended to conclude with a splashdown off California on October 8.

NASA Blogs reported the planned timeline on Wednesday, October 7. Because that notice preceded the scheduled departure and landing events, it documented what NASA and SpaceX intended to do rather than confirming the ultimate result of either operation.

The departing group consisted of NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev. Their presence in the same capsule underscored the multinational structure of International Space Station crews, with personnel from three space organizations sharing the final trip away from the orbital complex.

Hatch closure between Dragon and the station was expected at approximately 6:20 a.m. EDT on October 7. Although visually simple, closing the hatch represented a clear operational boundary: the crew would no longer be moving between the spacecraft and the station, and Dragon would be configured as the astronauts’ independent vehicle for the flight home.

The spacecraft was scheduled to undock autonomously at 8:05 a.m. That left about one hour and 45 minutes between the planned hatch closure and physical separation, a period reserved in the timeline for the procedures required before the spacecraft could safely begin flying on its own.

NASA said its live coverage of undocking was due to begin at 7:45 a.m., 20 minutes before the scheduled maneuver. The broadcast plan divided public coverage around the mission’s most consequential milestones rather than attempting to treat the entire 27-hour return as a single uninterrupted event.

Once clear of the station, Crew-12 was expected to begin a journey of about 27 hours. That interval is important to understanding the return profile: undocking did not mean an immediate descent. Dragon first had to proceed through its orbital flight plan before reaching the point at which it could commit to leaving orbit.

NASA and SpaceX were targeting splashdown at about 11:34 a.m. on Thursday, October 8, off the California coast. The wording in the source identified this as a target, not a post-flight record, and the October 7 update did not establish whether the spacecraft ultimately landed at that exact time.

Coverage of the closing phase was planned from 10:20 a.m. on October 8. NASA listed the deorbit burn, atmospheric entry, and splashdown as the principal events to be shown. Together, those steps would have taken Dragon from orbital flight through the high-energy return environment and finally to a water landing.

The return completed the planned arc of a mission that had begun months earlier at Cape Canaveral. Crew-12 launched at 5:15 a.m. EST on February 13 from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, using the Dragon spacecraft that would later serve as the crew’s vehicle home.

Dragon reached the orbital outpost at 3:15 p.m. the following day. The interval between launch and docking placed the crew aboard the station on February 14, after which the capsule remained associated with their expedition until the departure preparations described in the October update.

Experience within the crew was evenly divided. Meir and Fedyaev were each on a second space mission, while the flight was the first for Hathaway and Adenot. The planned departure therefore brought together two returning spaceflight veterans and two first-time flyers for the same undocking, reentry, and splashdown sequence.

The announcement also illustrated how a crew return is communicated in stages. NASA specified separate start times for undocking coverage and for the later deorbit and landing coverage, while directing readers to the station blog and the ISS accounts on X, Facebook, and Instagram for broader activity updates.

What the October 7 item did not provide was equally significant. It offered no post-event confirmation, no revised timing, and no account of conditions during descent. Read as of October 20, it is therefore best understood as a detailed preview of Crew-12’s intended farewell and return rather than a report establishing how the mission ended.