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Stranded Wilmore and Williams poised to return to Earth

13/3/2025 6:01
NASA is set to launch a SpaceX

rocket from Florida on Wednesday carrying a replacement crew for

the International Space Station in a mission that sets up the

return to Earth of U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni

Williams - stuck in space for nine months after a trip on

Boeing's faulty Starliner.

The U.S. space agency moved up the mission by two weeks after

President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX,

called for Wilmore and Williams to be brought back earlier than

NASA had planned.



A planned eight-day stay on the orbiting station has dragged

on for Wilmore and Williams, a pair of veteran astronauts and

U.S. Navy test pilots. Starliner returned to Earth without them

last year.



SpaceX's rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy

Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 7:48 p.m. ET (2348 GMT) with a

crew of two U.S. astronauts and one astronaut each from Japan

and Russia.



Wilmore and Williams have been working on research and

maintenance with the space station's other astronauts and have

remained safe, according to NASA. Williams told reporters in a

March 4 call that she is looking forward to seeing her family

and pet dogs upon returning home.



"It's been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit

more so than for us," Williams said of her family. "We're here,

we have a mission - we're just doing what we do every day, and

every day is interesting because we're up in space and it's a

lot of fun."

The flight, known as Crew-10, normally would be considered a

routine astronaut rotation. Instead, it has become entangled in

politics as Trump and Musk have sought - without offering

evidence - to blame former President Joe Biden for the delayed

return of Wilmore and Williams.



The demands by Trump and Musk for an earlier return were an

unusual intervention in NASA's human spaceflight operations. The

mission previously had a target date of March 26, but NASA

swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule with a different one that would

be ready sooner.



When the new crew arrives aboard the station, Wilmore and

Williams and two others - NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian

cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov - can return to Earth in a capsule

that has been attached to the station since September, as part

of the prior Crew-9 mission.



Wilmore and Williams could not leave until the new Crew-10

craft arrives in order to keep the ISS staffed with enough U.S.

astronauts for maintenance, according to NASA. The departure

from the station is expected on Sunday, with a return to Earth

later that day or Monday.



Wilmore and Williams flew to the station in June as the

first test crew of Boeing's Starliner, which suffered propulsion

system issues in space. NASA deemed it too risky for the

astronauts to fly home on the Boeing craft. This led to the

current plan to bring them home in a SpaceX capsule.



Boeing built Starliner under a $4.5 billion contract with

NASA to compete with SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, which since

2020 has been the U.S. space agency's only vehicle for sending

ISS crew members to orbit from American soil. Last year's

mission had marked Starliner's first test flight with astronauts

aboard, a requirement before NASA could certify the capsule for

routine astronaut missions.



Starliner's development has been plagued with engineering

issues and cost overruns since 2019, putting it far behind

SpaceX's Crew Dragon, which was developed under a similar NASA

contract worth at least $4 billion.



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