Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams: NASA to bring Boeing -Astronauts home earlier than expected

Sign up for CNNs Wonder Theory Science Newsletter. Explore the universe with news of fascinating discoveries, scientific progress and more.

Cnn
–

NASA said on Tuesday that it could bring Butch Wilmore and Suni William’s home – the two astronauts launched on Boeing Starliner’s first crew testing and has been at the space station months longer than expected – a few weeks before than previously announced.

The aerospace agency said it was able to adjust the schedule because it chose to exchange SpaceX Crew Dragon Capsule, which it will use to fly its crew-10 mission, which is now being launched as soon as March 12 “Pending Mission Preparedness.” The new date could set Williams and Wilmore’s scheduled return days ahead of the plan when the space agency previously said it was targeted at the end of March.

The crew-10 astronauts will arrive at International Space Station before Williams and Wilmore, currently awarded the Crew-9 mission, can end their rotation at the orbiting laboratory and go back to Earth.

The crew-9 space vessel, the crew freedom, currently placed to the space station, can “return to the ground after a multi-day transfer period with the newly arrived Crew-10 Expedition Crew,” according to a statement from the US Space Agency.

The message comes after SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and President Donald Trump saw confusion over the Starliner astronauts’ situation and tried to demand credit for their returns on a SpaceX capsule -a plan that had been in place for months.

In posts on X, the social media platform Musk, which was purchased in 2022, Musk said that Trump had instructed him to bring Williams and Wilmore home “as soon as possible.”

“We’ll do it,” Musk post read. “Terrible about the bit -the administration left those there for so long.”

But NASA officials had announced in August plans to return Williams and Wilmore using a SpaceX vehicle -long before Musk or Trump mentioned the mission.

NASA had expected to use a newly built crew Dragon Capsule to launch the crew-10 as soon as February, but in December the Space Agency revealed that mission teams needed further “time to complete the treatment” on the SpaceX capsule. Therefore, the return date for Williams and Wilmore’s Crew-9 mission changed from February to the end of March.

However, with the latest plans, which NASA announced, the agency will instead make use of the crews’ endurance, which has previously flown three missions, most recently the crew-7 mission returning to Earth in March 2024 after a seven-month stay at Space Station .

Williams and Wilmore have been at the space station since last June. Piloting of the initial crew Mission of Boeing’s Starliner Space vessels, the couple experienced a rocky journey to the space station. The astronauts were originally scheduled to spend about a week at the Orbiting Laboratory.

After Starliner arrived at the space station, NASA and Boeing worked for weeks to better understand the problems – including helium leaks and propulsion problems – which plagued the first stage of the test flight.

NASA officials eventually decided it was too risky to return Starliner with the crew. Williams and Wilmore have since become official members of the space station staff as they wait for their return with the other members of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

The Crew-10 mission, which will relieve Williams and Wilmore from their long-standing lane with low soil includes NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.