Two NASA astronauts who launched on a short mission to the International Space Station last year that turned into a 9-month marathon finally know when they’ll be coming home.
The Boeing Starliner astronauts, who launched on the spacecraft’s Crewed Flight Test on June 5, have been living aboard the International Space Station (ISS) ever since after their capsule returned to Earth without them. On Friday (March 7), NASA cleared a relief crew to launch on SpaceX Dragon next week, setting the stage for their long-awaited return to Earth.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams expected to be aboard the ISS for about 10 days, but issues with their Starliner spacecraft forced the agency to put their return on an hold while the problem was worked on the ground. Ultimately, NASA decided to return Starliner without its crew, leaving Williams and Wilmore on the ISS for a long-duration mission, which — at last — has an end in sight. The astronauts will return to Earth on March 16, NASA officials said Friday.
Starliner departed the space station uncrewed last September. A few weeks later, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov launched on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission with two seats aboard their Dragon spacecraft reserved for Williams and Wilmore during their return journey, originally scheduled for February. All four will return together on March 16.
“When we looked at the situation at the time, we had a Crew-9 launch in front of us. It made sense to take the opportunity to bring Crew-9 up with just two seats and have Butch and Suni fill in, and do the rest of the long-duration mission,” ISS program manager Dana Weigel explained Friday during a flight readiness press briefing for the next astronaut flight to launch.
That flight, called Crew-10, will launch four astronauts to the ISS on March 12 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on a mission expected to last about six months. The launch has gained extra attention in the media, as Crew-10’s arrival at the ISS will allow Crew-9’s departure, and the return of Boeing’s bygone astronauts Williams and Wilmore.
Crew-10 is commanded and piloted by NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, respectively. They will be joined by mission specialists JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. The quartet had originally been slated to fly on a brand-new Crew Dragon being built by SpaceX for the mission.
Delays in its construction due to battery issues, however, led NASA to initially delay the launch to “late March,” then ultimately to swap the mission’s spacecraft to an already flight-proven Dragon. Now, instead of a shiny, new, yet-to-be-named Dragon, Crew-10 will launch aboard the veteran capsule Endurance, a spacecraft that’s already flown three NASA crews to the space station and back.
The spacecraft swap followed public remarks made by President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk repeating the “stranded astronauts” narrative in posts online, though NASA officials say discussions to switch the Crew-10 spacecraft were happening inside the space agency well before the issue slipped into the political spotlight.
Steve Stitch, manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said it’s “very typical” for new spacecraft to experience delays during the manufacturing process, during Friday’s FRR call.
“We’re always looking and refining the manifest,” Stitch said. “We started looking at that schedule, and at that time, early this year, late January, that’s when we finally decided we’ll move to [Endurance].”
Endurance arrived at KSC earlier this week for final checkouts before being attached to its Falcon 9 rocket inside SpaceX’s hangar at Launch Complex-39A. The Crew-10 astronauts arrived at the spaceport on Friday aboard a NASA Gulfstream V jet, where McClain addressed the media.
McClain said she and her crewmates were honored to be able to continue the international partnerships that make the space station possible, and reflected on the space station’s contributions to science. She noted the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Apollo-Soyuz mission that brought NASA astronauts and Soviet Union cosmonauts together in space for the first time in 1975.
“If you want to go fast, you go alone, but if you want to go far, you go together,” McClain said, explaining that Apollo-Soyuz laid the groundwork for what would eventually lead to the ISS.
Anne McClain
“It is far easier to be enemies than it is to be friends, and it is far, far harder to build partnerships and build relationships than it is to break them…The success of these programs rely on leaders of character from all countries, all walks of life, all agencies, all badges, all companies; leaders of character, visionaries, visionaries who wake up every single day and work on a long-term plan for the benefit of all of us.”
This will be McClain’s second time in space. Her first mission coincided with the first uncrewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule in 2019 — a fact she reflected on in her remarks, noting the fast pace of progress for the spacecraft. “That is absolutely incredible to me,” she said. Onishi is also launching for his second time to the ISS, his first taking place aboard a Soyuz rocket for ISS Expeditions 48/49 in 2016. For Ayers and Peskov, this will be their first time in space.
Crew-10 is currently scheduled to launch at 7:48 p.m. EDT (2348 GMT) on March 12. Endurance will take about 14 hours to catch up to the ISS, with docking expected a day later at about 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT).
Normally, crews coming and going on the ISS overlap by about a week or so. This allows incoming astronauts — especially first-time flyers — a grace period to get used to the microgravity while the outgoing crew orients them on the various responsibilities they’ll be taking over. The handover for Crew-10, however, will be much quicker.
With their arrival slated for March 13, members of Crew-10 will only overlap with Crew-9 by about three days. Barring a delay in Crew-10’s launch and arrival, Freedom is scheduled to undock from the space station March 16 to return the Crew-9 astronauts to Earth.
“It takes a full crew to continuously crew the space station, both for science and for maintenance, and that is the work that we’re looking forward to doing when we get to the space station,” McClain said Friday. The Crew-10 commander said her team has been in “constant communications with Crew-9,” praising the research and station upkeep the current crew has performed during their stay.
“They’ve been conducting science, maintenance, and they’ve been keeping the station running, and we’re ready to high five them and bring them home in the coming weeks,” McClain said.
As the Crew-10 launch approaches and Crew-9 wrap up their time in low-Earth orbit, the transition from Expedition 72 to Expedition 73 also began Friday.
In a change of command ceremony held aboard the station, Williams (the station’s current commander) passed the key to the space station over to cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, though he won’t be in command long. Once Crew-10 arrives, that title will pass to Onishi, who will keep the role during his six-month stint on the orbital lab.