Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more! Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. The Crew-11 launch date is part of a tight choreography of space station traffic over the next several months, which includes the recent arrivals of the Ax-4 private astronaut mission, as well as Russia's Progress 92 cargo flight. Axiom's astronauts must depart the ISS before Crew-11's launch, which will be followed in a matter of days by the departure of Crew-10. That will clear a port for the arrival of SpaceX's CRS-33 Cargo Dragon and make way for the upcoming boost maneuver. "Providing multiple methods for us to maintain the station altitude is critically important as we continue to operate and get the most use out of our limited launch resources that we do have," Bill Spetch, ISS operations integration manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said during Thursday's briefing. "We're really looking forward to demonstrating that capability with [CRS-33] showing up after we get through the Crew-11 and Crew-10 handover." Between now and the end of the year, the ISS is also expecting the arrival of Northrop Grumman's NG-23 Cygnus cargo mission, JAXA's HTV-X cargo vehicle, and the Soyuz MS-28 mission carrying NASA astronaut Christopher Williams and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev in November. The members of Crew-11 will be part of ISS Expedition 73/74 and will experience a significant milestone during their mission. Nov. 2 will mark 25 consecutive years that the ISS has sustained a continual human presence. "That's going to be a huge milestone," said Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA's Space Operations Mission Directorate. The occasion, he added, is "a great testament to the work of our commercial partners, our international partners and the whole NASA team." Crew-11's launch window opens at 12:09 p.m. EDT (1609 GMT) on July 31. If that launch schedule holds, the crew will have a 39-hour transit to meet up with the space station — the longest time between launch and rendezvous for a Crew Dragon ISS mission to date. Mission constraints like onboard consumables dictate that the spacecraft dock with the ISS within a 40-hour window following launch, but Cardman says that comes with some wiggle room. "That 40-hour limit is in place so that we can preserve margin for the downhill as well," Cardman explained to Space.com, "so nothing magically happens at 40 hours and one second." An on-time departure would put Crew-11 on track to dock with the ISS around 3:00 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT) on Aug. 3, after which the four astronauts will settle into their new orbital home for a long-duration stint aboard the space station that will be filled with a complex schedule of science, maintenance and staring endlessly at the wonders of Earth below. "We will have a world-class physics experiment one hour and then fixing the toilet the next hour and then doing some biological science data collection on myself the next," Cardman explained. "Understanding how to live and work for long durations — going and staying — is a really interesting challenge, and I'm grateful that we've gotten the chance to do this — to hone our skills on the ISS, so that we can do this for longer durations on the moon," she said. "The International Space Station, in my perspective, is an absolutely critical stepping stone as we think about going farther afield." Related Stories: