SMART NEWS

NASA’s Starliner Astronauts Face Another Delay in Their Return Home, Drawing Out Their Unexpectedly Long Mission

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were supposed to stay at the ISS for a little over a week. It’s now been more than six months, and the end date has been pushed again

Margherita Bassi

Daily Correspondent

December 18, 2024 3:18 p.m.

Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams inspect safety hardware aboard the ISS in August 2024. NASA

Two NASA astronauts who launched on an eight-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS) in June had already seen their intended short stint in orbit stretched into an eight-month odyssey. Now, however, the pair’s return home will be postponed even further because of a delay in the arrival of their replacement crew, NASA announced in a statement on Tuesday.

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore arrived at the ISS in early June aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft in its first crewed test flight. The craft, meant to one day shuttle astronauts back and forth from orbit, experienced helium leaks and thruster failures during its flight. As such, NASA deemed Starliner unfit to return the astronauts to Earth. Starliner’s capsule Calypso made the journey home—crewless and in autonomous mode—in September.

As its pilots, “you don’t want to see it go off without you, but that’s where we wound up,” Wilmore told the Associated Press’ Marcia Dunn at the time.

With Calypso back on Earth, NASA saved Williams and Wilmore seats on a SpaceX Dragon craft scheduled to return the Crew-9 mission astronauts from the ISS in February. Now, the agency says they’ll have to wait until late March at the earliest. The change is due to a delay in the launch of NASA’s Crew-10 mission, which was pushed back to allow engineers more processing time for a new Dragon spacecraft. The vehicle is scheduled to arrive at SpaceX’s Florida processing facility in January.

“Fabrication, assembly, testing and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking endeavor that requires great attention to detail,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, says in the statement. “We appreciate the hard work by the SpaceX team to expand the Dragon fleet in support of our missions and the flexibility of the station program and expedition crews as we work together to complete the new capsule’s readiness for flight.”

NASA announced a delay of about a month for the launch of SpaceX Crew 10 mission to the International Space Station to allow more time for processing the new Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will fly for the first time on this mission.https://t.co/AyFCq7vyP2

: NASA pic.twitter.com/XftlYqPO0X
— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) December 17, 2024

The astronauts on Crew-10—Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers of NASA, Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov—will take over operations of the ISS from Crew-9. For a period, both crews will overlap on the station, a process called “crewed handover.” Upon Crew-10’s arrival, Crew-9—NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, in addition to Williams and Wilmore—will share the necessary information to ensure a smooth transition for the ISS, including the ongoing science experiments.

NASA has not revealed how long the handover period is expected to last. Even if it’s brief, by then Williams and Wilmore will have spent nearly nine months aboard the orbital station. But they’ve been engaging in crew activities and contributing to maintenance and science.

“There’s always work to do on the space station. For most of the life of the space station, we’ve had a backlog of science experiments that we just didn’t have enough crews up there to take care of,” former NASA astronaut Michael Fossum told the Texas Standard’s Shelly Brisbin in early September. “I have a feeling right now they’re working through that backlog fairly quickly with the larger crew up there—with Butch and Suni.”

Two resupply missions in November have ensured that the ISS remains well-stocked for its crew, NASA notes in the statement. The flights even brought special items to allow Crew-9 to celebrate the holidays in orbit.

“I’m sure that they are already disappointed that they were going to miss Christmas back home with the folks,” Simeon Barber, a planetary science specialist at the Open University, tells the BBC’s Pallab Ghosh. “But this is only another two months on an already quite long mission, and I’m sure if you ask them, I’m sure they would tell you that the space station is where they love to be.”