The Crew-10 Dragon capsule sits atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket prior to launch. (Photo credit: SpaceX)
NASA launched the Crew-10 mission, which provided relief to American astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who had been on the International Space Station (ISS) for the past nine months, and finally allowed them to return to Earth.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:04 p.m. ET on Friday (March 14) as part of a scheduled crew rotation for the ISS.
The Dragon capsule, mounted on top, is carrying four astronauts: NASA's Nicole Ayers and Anne McClain, Roscosmos's Kirill Peskov, and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. If all goes well, the capsule is scheduled to dock with the ISS at 11:30 p.m. ET on Saturday (March 15).
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS as part of Boeing's first test flight of Starliner. Starliner launched its first crewed test flight from the space station at Cape Canaveral in Florida on June 5, 2024. However, problems arose shortly after reaching orbit, including five helium leaks and five reaction control system (RCS) thruster failures.
As a result, the mission, originally planned for eight days, dragged on for more than two months before NASA declared it over on August 24. On September 6, the Starliner capsule separated from the ISS and returned to Earth without a crew.
While awaiting Crew-10's changeover, Wilmore and Williams performed a variety of maintenance tasks and participated in scientific research.
Their stay was generally safe, but not without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke up in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS, forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board, to take refuge in their space capsules.
Following a ceremony to hand over command from Crew 9 to Crew 10, Wilmore and Williams, along with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Alexander Gorbunov of Roscosmos, will return home aboard the docked Crew 9 capsule on March 19. The Starliner astronauts will have spent nearly 300 consecutive days in space—not the record of 437 days set by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995, but still a significant amount of time.
Today's launch was the third attempt to launch the Crew-10 mission, NASA said, with the first attempt on Wednesday (March 12) being called off due to hydraulic system problems and the next attempt on Thursday (March 13) being called off due to high winds and precipitation along the rocket's flight path.
“We were prepared to stay a long time, even though we were planning on staying a short time,” Wilmore said during a news conference broadcast from the ISS on March 4. “That’s part of human spaceflight. That’s the essence of your country’s human spaceflight program — planning for the unexpected. And we did it.”
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