NASA and SpaceX hope to bring astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been stuck on the International Space Station for more than seven months, home in March.
The two NASA astronauts who have been stuck on the International Space Station for more than seven months are scheduled to finally return home in March, sooner than expected.
Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stranded on the space station since they left Earth on June 5, 2024 aboard Boeing’s Starliner aircraft, which experienced helium leaks and propulsion system issues. Wilmore and Williams became aware of the issues once they docked at the space station.
SpaceX’s Dragon aircraft is scheduled to launch on March 12 to head to the space station, then return home with Wilmore and Williams after a handover period of several days, NASA said. The sped-up timeline comes after the agency said in December that late March would be the earliest launch date.
“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges. Our operational flexibility is enabled by the tremendous partnership between NASA and SpaceX and the agility SpaceX continues to demonstrate to safely meet the agency’s emerging needs,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a Tuesday statement. “We greatly benefit from SpaceX’s commercial efforts and their proactive approach in having another spacecraft ready for us to assess and use in support of Crew-10.”
NASA was able to successfully return the Starliner to Earth in September without Wilmore and Williams.
The administration then determined that Crew-9 on SpaceX’s Dragon aircraft would retrieve the two stranded astronauts and return to Earth, with an initial projected date of February 2025.
In order to accomplish the return, there will be a handover between Crew-9 and Crew-10. SpaceX’s Dragon Crew-10 team is expected to arrive at the space station on March 12, “pending mission readiness and completion of the agency’s certification of flight readiness process,” NASA said in a press release.
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Once the Crew-10 arrives, the team will have a brief introduction and overview of ongoing space and station work for Crew-10 to replace Crew-9 on the space station.
At that point, NASA and SpaceX will work together to prepare for Crew-9’s return to Earth with Wilmore and Williams, along with Crew-9 astronauts Nick Hague of NASA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
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Aboard the Crew-10 team are NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA mission specialist Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos mission specialist Kirill Peskov.
Wilmore and Williams assured reporters in September that they were not “fretting” over their situation in space, adding that they were “grateful” for more time on the space station.
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“Boeing’s on board with that. We’re all on board with that,” Wilmore said at the time. “We found some things that we just could not get comfortable with putting us back in the Starliner when we had other options.”
Crew-10 will be using a previously flown Dragon aircraft that will mark its fourth mission to the space station, after it previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights, according to NASA.
