- Boeing Starliner problems extended a one-week mission into a nine-month stay for NASA astronauts.
- If all goes well with Wednesday's SpaceX launch, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams could be back March 17.
- An earlier flight back to Earth would have left the International Space Station understaffed, according to NASA.
If all goes to plan, the Wednesday evening launch of a SpaceX Dragon capsule will mark the final countdown to the conclusion of an epic saga for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who rocketed into space over nine months ago for an expected one-week stay on the International Space Station.
But a slew of technical issues with the Boeing Starliner spaceship that Wilmore and Williams flew to the station on the craft’s debut crewed mission led to a decision to keep them aboard the space station as Starliner returned to Earth empty last September.
Later that month, a modified SpaceX Crew 9 mission arrived at the International Space Station with two astronauts aboard and two empty seats to bring Wilmore and Williams back home.
Pending any unforeseen issues, the SpaceX Crew 10 mission is scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 5:48 p.m. MDT Wednesday and arrive at the space station Friday morning. Following a two-day handover period, Wilmore and Williams, along with two other astronauts, are expected to undock from the space station aboard their Crew 9 Dragon capsule on Sunday, March 16, and return to Earth the following day.
NASA and SpaceX will be livestreaming the launch event, beginning at 1:45 p.m. MDT on Wednesday.
Trump weighs in
Shortly after taking the oath of office in January, President Donald Trump took to social media to announce he had directed SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to “go get” the Starliner crew members.
Trump laid the blame for the astronauts' extended stay on the space station on former President Joe Biden in his post to Truth Social, a platform operated by the Trump Media and Technology Group.
“I have just asked Elon Musk and SpaceX to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in January. “Good luck Elon!!!”
Musk, who reportedly contributed some $270 million to Trump’s reelection effort and has become a member of the president’s inner circle following his appointment as co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency, posted a response to Trump’s request on his own platform, X, formerly Twitter.
“The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible," Musk wrote. “We will do so.”
Since deciding to keep Wilmore and Williams aboard the International Space Station due to safety concerns over the troubled Starliner capsule, NASA has stated repeatedly that the astronauts, who are also both veteran Navy test pilots, are not “stranded” and noted that every mission to the space station includes a contingency plan for longer stays.
A decision to bring Wilmore and Williams home early aboard the Crew-9 ship ahead of Crew-10’s arrival would have left NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who flew to the International Space Station with a Russian crew last September, as the only American aboard the station, a rare staffing imbalance that NASA has said complicates maintenance of the station’s U.S. components.
“Sure, it could have taken us home, but that leaves only three people on the space station from the Soyuz crew, two Russians and one American,” Williams told CBS News in an in-flight interview. “And, you know, the space station is big. It’s a building, you know, it’s the size of a football field. Things happen.”
Why are Williams and Wilmore still in space?
Problems with the flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule arose early on when five of 28 maneuvering thrusters failed to perform as expected during the ship’s docking at the International Space Station on June 6, 2024. Engineers also identified five small helium leaks, some of which were detected before the spacecraft launched. Helium is used in the capsule’s thruster firing procedure.
Engineering teams spent months working to identify the underlying issues with the thrusters, critical for maneuvering and positioning the spacecraft, including reviewing massive amounts of data, conducting flight and ground testing, hosting independent reviews with agency propulsion experts and developing various return contingency plans, NASA reported last year.
But ultimately NASA decided that ongoing uncertainty and a lack of concurrence at the time among engineers and other experts about resolving the Starliner problems “does not meet the agency’s safety and performance requirements for human spaceflight, thus prompting NASA leadership to move the astronauts to the (SpaceX Dragon) Crew-9 mission.”
The Starliner capsule returned to Earth empty last Sept. 6 following a six-hour flight that did not encounter any issues.
Later that month, the SpaceX Crew 9 mission docked at the International Space Station, with only two astronauts aboard and plans to fill the remaining seats in the four-passenger capsule with Williams and Wilmore for a return flight scheduled, at the time, for February 2025.
On Dec. 17, NASA announced it was delaying the SpaceX Crew 10 mission launch and the expected crew handoff that would have marked the end of Williams’ and Wilmore’s time at the space station. NASA said the delay would push out the Crew 9-Crew 10 handoff to late March 2025.
