A SpaceX capsule delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station early on Sunday to allow a pair of stuck NASA astronauts to return to Earth.
NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will be able to return home after nine months on a mission that was only supposed to last a week following a launch on Boeing’s first astronaut flight that faced issues, prompting NASA to bring the Starliner back empty.
The Crew-10 astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked to the station at 12:04 a.m. on Sunday, about 29 hours after launching at 7:03 p.m. on Friday from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
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The four new arrivals representing the U.S., Japan and Russia will spend the next few days learning about the station from Wilmore and Williams. The four — NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov — are scheduled to stay on the station for roughly six months.
Later this week, Wilmore and Williams will enter their own SpaceX capsule that has been up there since last year to close out a mission that began last June.
Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to depart the station on Wednesday as early as 4 a.m., along with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, before splashing down off Florida’s coast.
Hague and Gorbunov flew to the station in September on a Crew Dragon capsule with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams. That aircraft has been attached to the station since their arrival.
The stuck astronauts have been doing scientific research and conducting routine maintenance.
Williams told reporters earlier this month that she was looking forward to returning home to see her family and two dogs.
“It’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” she said.
Former NASA astronaut Leroy Chiao spoke during an appearance on the Fox News Channel about the arrival of Crew-10, which he said went smoothly.
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“This is not like the movies. You don’t just kind of dock and then open the hatches … it’s going to take a while to do all the leak checks, let everything come to thermal equilibrium to make sure any pressure fluctuations are only due to temperature changes,” he said. “And then they’ll open up the hatches and the Crew-10 will be welcomed on board and everybody’s going to be celebrating.”
“So this looks like a completely flawless, successful mission so far,” he continued. “And of course, Sunny and Butch are looking forward to, you know, taking them around, doing the handover and then getting in their spacecraft with their crew and coming back down to Earth in the next few days.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
