NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore on board the ISS.
Credit: PTI File Photo
NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore are finally expected to return home on March 19 after spending eight months on the International Space Station (ISS) due to technical issues with their spacecraft.
India-origin astronaut Willimas and Wilmore in an interview with CNN confirmed that NASA's Crew-10 mission is slated to launch on March 10 from Earth and bring the pair back on March 19.
“The plan is that Crew-10 will launch on March 12, do a turnover for a week, and we will return on March 19,” Wilmore said in the interview.
Williams and Wilmore have been living on the space station since June 2024 after arriving on a Boeing Co Starliner capsule, becoming the first crew to fly on the vehicle as part of a critical test flight that was meant to last roughly a week.
But Starliner suffered numerous technical issues with its thruster engines during its flight and so NASA decided to bring the Boeing capsule home to Earth empty, with Williams and Wilmore to return on a future SpaceX capsule instead.
The Crew-10 mission will transport NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, to the ISS for a six-month mission.
This will be followed by a week-long handover process during which the current Space Station Commander, Williams will handover command, this is to ensure smooth handover.
Williams and Wilmore will board the Dragon spacecraft which brough the Crew-10 to the ISS and on March 19 undock.
During the interview, the astronauts said that they are not "stranded" in low-Earth orbit aboard the ISS nor do they feel "stuck" or "abandoned."
Debunking claims by US President Donald Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that they were "abandoned" Wilmore said, “That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We both get it… But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about.”
“Help us change the narrative. Let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed.’ That’s what we prefer,” he added.
Williams agreeing with Wilmore said, " “We knew that we would probably find some things (wrong with Starliner), and we found some stuff, and so that was not a surprise.”
This decision to bring the astronauts follows Trump and Musk issuing separate statements in January claiming that SpaceX will “go get” two astronauts on the International Space Station “as soon as possible''. It is important to note that SpaceX played a crucial role in developing the Crew Dragon capsule under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program which is set to bring the duo back to Earth.
Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program in a statement said, “Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges. Our operational flexibility is enabled by the tremendous partnership between NASA and SpaceX and the agility SpaceX continues to demonstrate to safely meet the agency’s emerging needs,.”