- NASA moved up the return flight for two stranded astronauts to beat an upcoming storm.
- Boeing Starliner problems extended a one-week mission into nine months in space.
- An earlier flight back to Earth would have left the International Space Station understaffed.
Thanks to the expectation of inclement weather off Florida’s coast later in the week, NASA officials announced Sunday a new, expedited schedule for the return of two long overdue astronauts whose one-week mission stretched into more than nine months in space.
Following the SpaceX Crew 10 arrival at the International Space Station on Saturday, veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are now just hours away from the beginning of their return trip to Earth aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule that’s been docked at the space station since last fall.
Wilmore and Williams rocketed into space last June 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 in space as Starliner returned to Earth empty last September.
Later that month, a modified SpaceX Crew 9 mission arrived at the space station with two astronauts aboard and two empty seats to bring Wilmore and Williams back home.
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.”
When will stranded astronauts return to Earth?
If all goes to plan, the Crew 9 mission with NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Williams and Wilmore, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, are expected to depart the space station at 11:05 p.m. MDT Monday. NASA moved the return flight up a day to bring the crew back to Earth ahead of an anticipated weather system headed for the Florida coast.
“NASA and SpaceX met on Sunday to assess weather and splashdown conditions off Florida’s coast for the return of the agency’s Crew 9 mission from the International Space Station,” NASA wrote in a Sunday press release. “Mission managers are targeting an earlier Crew 9 return opportunity based on favorable conditions forecasted for the evening of Tuesday, March 18.”
NASA will carry live coverage of the undocking procedure beginning at 10:45 p.m. MDT Monday. Video coverage will resume at 2:45 p.m. MDT Tuesday ahead of Crew 9’s expected splashdown in the waters off Florida at approximately 3:57 p.m. MDT.
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 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.