As part of a NASA crew replacement mission, a SpaceX capsule sent four astronauts to the ISS early Sunday. This will enable Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two stranded astronauts, to return home after spending nine months aboard the orbiting laboratory.
NASA
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule of the Crew 10 astronauts docked with the ISS at 12:04 p.m. ET (0404 GMT) on Sunday, approximately 29 hours after it was launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03 p.m. ET on Friday.
The seven-member crew of the station welcomed them, including Wilmore and Williams, who are retired Navy test pilots and veteran NASA astronauts who stayed on board after Boeing’s Starliner (BA.N) had to be brought down empty due to issues.
The Crew-10 mission, which would otherwise be a standard crew rotation flight, is a long-awaited first step toward returning Wilmore and Williams to Earth.
Wilmore and Williams, along with Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov and NASA astronaut Nick Hague, are expected to depart the ISS as early as 4 a.m. (8 a.m. GMT) on Wednesday.
It has been connected to the ISS ever since Hague and Gorbunov traveled there in September on a Crew Dragon spacecraft that had two seats available for Wilmore and Williams.
It is a component of a plan that NASA developed last year and that President Donald Trump has made more urgent since taking office in January.
Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers are part of the mission-10 mission, which is expected to stay on the station for about six months.
The crew replacement mission became involved in politics when Mr. Trump and his advisor Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of SpaceX, urged on a faster Crew-10 launch.
Together with the other five astronauts, Wilmore and Williams conducted routine maintenance and scientific research aboard the ISS as their mission evolved into a typical NASA cycle.