WASHINGTON: A routine crew rotation at the International Space Station has taken on unusual significance: It paves the way for a pair of astronauts stranded for more than nine months to finally come home.
\nThe NASA-SpaceX Crew-10 mission is set to launch from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday at 7:48 p.m. (2348 GMT), bound for the ISS.
\n\u201cAll systems are looking good and weather is a go,\u201d SpaceX wrote Wednesday on X, as the team of two US astronauts, one Japanese astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut said their goodbyes to relatives and drove to the launch pad.
\nAll eyes however will be on Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the NASA duo who have been stuck aboard the ISS since June after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft developed propulsion issues and was deemed unfit for their return.
\nWilmore and Williams were initially slated for an eight-day mission but were reassigned to Crew-9 after its astronauts arrived in September aboard a SpaceX Dragon. The spacecraft carried only two crew members instead of the usual four to make room for Wilmore and Williams.
\nCrew-9 can only return to Earth after Crew-10 arrives.
\n\u201cWe came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short,\u201d Wilmore said in a recent news conference. \u201cThat\u2019s what your nation\u2019s human space flight program is all about, planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies.\u201d
\nCrew-10 is expected to dock early Thursday, followed by a brief handover before Crew-9 departs on March 16 for an ocean splashdown off the Florida coast, weather permitting.
\nAlong with Wilmore and Williams, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will also be aboard the returning Dragon capsule.
\nSpace remains an area of cooperation between the United States and Russia despite the Ukraine conflict, with cosmonauts traveling to the ISS aboard SpaceX Crew Dragons and astronauts doing the same via Soyuz capsules launched from Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n
Wilmore and Williams\u2019s prolonged stay has recently become a political flashpoint, as President Donald Trump and his close adviser Elon Musk have accused ex-president Joe Biden\u2019s administration of abandoning the pair.
\nSpaceX boss Musk has suggested, without providing specifics, that he had offered Biden a \u201crescue\u201d mission outside of the routine crew rotations.
\nHowever, with Trump now in office for nearly two months, the astronauts are still set to return as originally planned.
\nThe issue recently sparked a heated online exchange between Musk and Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen, whom Musk called a slur for mentally disabled people. Several retired astronauts quickly came to Mogensen\u2019s defense.
\nOne astronaut who backed Musk however was Wilmore, who offered contradictory statements in last week\u2019s press conference.
\n\u201cI can only say that Mr. Musk, what he says is absolutely factual,\u201d he said, seemingly endorsing the SpaceX founder\u2019s version of events, before adding \u201cpolitics is not playing into this at all.\u201d
\nThe Crew-10 team consists of NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan\u2019s Takuya Onishi, and Russia\u2019s Kirill Peskov.
\nMcClain, the mission\u2019s commander, will be making her second trip to space.
\n\u201cI\u2019m looking forward to breaking bread with those guys, talking to them, giving them big hugs,\u201d she said of Wilmore and Williams.
\nDuring their mission, the new crew will conduct a range of scientific experiments, including flammability tests for future spacecraft designs and research into the effects of space on the human body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WASHINGTON: A routine crew rotation at the International Space Station has taken on unusual significance: It paves the way for a pair of astronauts stranded for more than nine months to finally come home. The NASA-SpaceX Crew-10 mission is set to launch from Florida\u2019s Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday at 7:48 p.m. (2348 GMT), bound …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":78313,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78297"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78297\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78315,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78297\/revisions\/78315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}