NASA is finally ready to launch its next space station crew, clearing the way for Starliner astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams to head back to Earth more than nine months after they took off on what they thought would be an eight-day stay in space.
Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov are scheduled for launch from historic pad 39 at the Kennedy Space Center at 7:48 p.m. EDT Wednesday. If all goes well, they will catch up with the space station Thursday, moving in for docking at the lab’s forward port at 6 a.m.
Standing by to welcome them aboard will be Crew 9 commander Nick Hague, cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams, along with cosmonauts Alexsey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who were launched last September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
McClain and her crewmates will spend two days getting briefed by Crew 9 on the intricacies of space station operations before Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams undock on March 16 for return to Earth. The normal “handover” period is five days or so, but mission managers shortened it this time around to maintain the lab’s food reserves.
While the ongoing saga of the “stranded” Starliner astronauts has overshadowed the Crew 10 mission, McClain said she and her crewmates began training for their mission in 2023 and they were all eager to finally get into space. McClain and Onishi are space station veterans while Ayers and Peskov are making their first flight.
All four are veteran military or commercial pilots. Before joining NASA, McClain, an active-duty Army colonel, served as a combat helicopter pilot while Ayers, an Air Force major, is a veteran F-22 Raptor pilot. Onishi served as a commercial pilot in Japan, flying Boeing 767 jetliners, and Peskov is an experienced commercial 757 pilot.
“We’re going to have planned and unplanned maintenance to keep the space station running,” McClain said. “We have a plethora of science experiments, both inside and outside of the space station. We have spacewalks. We have visiting vehicles (and) the potential of (hosting) private astronaut missions.”
“They’re ready to come home”
As for Wilmore and Williams, McClain said, “honestly, I’m kind of most looking forward to breaking bread with those guys, talking to them, giving them big hugs. We go way back. … We’re ready to go up there. They’re ready to come home.”
“This is a huge mission for us on Crew 10,” said Steve Stich, manager of the commercial crew program that oversees SpaceX Crew Dragons and Boeing’s Starliner. “They’re all big, but this started all the way back to Crew 9 when we launched that mission with two empty seats, and we had those seats reserved for Butch and Suni.”
The Starliner astronauts have “just done a phenomenal job,” Stich said, “and so we’re excited to bring them back.”
Given an on-time launch for Crew 10, Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams could undock on March 16 and land as early as March 17. If so, the Starliner astronauts will have logged 285 days — 9.5 months — in space on a flight originally expected to last a little longer than one week. Hague and Gorbunov’s time in space will come to 170 days.
The U.S. record for longest single spaceflight is held by astronaut Frank Rubio, who spent 371 days in space because of problems with the Soyuz spacecraft that carried him to orbit. Like the Starliner crew, he was forced to extend his mission and come home on a different Soyuz.
In any case, what would normally be a relatively routine crew rotation, sending up four crew members to replace four others wrapping up a five- to six-month station visit, has turned into political theater, fueled by repeated criticism from President Trump and Elon Musk blaming the Biden administration for the Starliner crew’s predicament.
Musk said in a post on his social media platform X that he offered to “go get” Wilmore and Williams earlier, but the offer was turned down. He did not say who turned the proposal down or even whether it was someone at NASA or the White House.
“Biden left them up there,” Mr. Trump told reporters from the Oval Office on March 6. “We have two astronauts that are stuck in space. I have asked Elon, I said, do me a favor, can you get ’em out? He said yes. He is preparing to go up I think in two weeks.”
But the Crew Dragon he was referring to will not be bringing Wilmore and Williams back to Earth. It will be carrying the Crew 10 fliers and will remain docked at the outpost for the next five months. Their arrival does, however, clear the way for Crew 9, including Wilmore and Williams, to finally return to Earth aboard their own Crew Dragon.
That Crew Dragon, which carried Hague and Gorbunov to the station last September for a normal tour of duty, has been docked at the lab ever since. It was launched with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams so their ride home has been at the station for the past five-and-a-half months.
NASA could have brought Crew 9 down earlier, but that would have left a single astronaut, Pettit, aboard the lab to operate and maintain the U.S. segment of the space station. Research would have ground to a halt and he would have had difficulty in a variety of emergency scenarios.
“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.
“So things can go wrong, and you need to be able to fix it, either inside and outside. And so having additional people to be able to do that is really important.”
“We don’t feel stranded”
Both Wilmore and Williams have repeatedly said they are not “stranded” and have not been “abandoned” in space.
“That’s been the narrative from day one, stranded, abandoned, stuck, and I get it, we both get it,” Wilmore told a reporter during a recent interview. “But that is, again, not what our human space flight program is about. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.
“We come prepared. We come committed. That is what your human space flight program is. It prepares for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those. … Let’s change (the narrative) to ‘prepared’ and ‘committed.’”
And so, NASA’s plan to bring the Starliner astronauts home, a plan managers said minimized disruption to the space station crew rotation schedule, has been in place since last August. Even so, the president has repeatedly blamed the Biden administration for the extended mission.
NASA managers have not openly challenged the president’s comments and have generally downplayed their responses to questions about Musk’s claim to have offered to launch another Crew Dragon to bring Wilmore and Williams home.
Last August, Stich was asked about the possibility of launching a mission specifically to bring the Starliner crew back to Earth. He told reporters during a news conference that the agency “really never considered that option.”
“From the very beginning, we liked the option of modifying Crew 9 or Crew 8,” he said, referring to the option of adding Williams and Wilmore to Hague’s crew or whether to shoehorn them into a Crew Dragon that brought four other station fliers back to Earth last October.
“We looked at both of those and bringing them back on either one of those vehicles,” Stich said at the time. “We’re trying to lay out the rest of our manifest to make sure we have vehicles available for all the flights. It just didn’t make sense to go ahead and accelerate a flight to return Butch and Suni earlier.”
What went wrong with Boeing’s Starliner?
Wilmore and Williams were launched aboard a Boeing Starliner capsule last June 5 for the spacecraft’s first piloted test flight. They successfully docked with the International Space Station the next day, but the Starliner experienced multiple helium propulsion system leaks and several maneuvering jets that did not produce the expected thrust.
NASA carried out weeks of tests and analysis to determine whether the Starliner could be trusted to safely bring its crew back to Earth.
By August, Boeing managers were convinced engineers understood the problems and the crew could safely come home in the Starliner. But NASA managers disagreed and ruled that option out. Instead, as Stich described, they decided to keep the astronauts aboard the station until early this year when they could hitch a ride back aboard the Crew 9 Dragon.
The Starliner astronauts took the news of a lengthy mission extension in stride.
“Butch, and I knew this was a test flight, we knew that we would probably find some things (that did not work as expected), and we found some stuff,” Williams told CBS News. “And so that was not a surprise. The discussion went over the summer, and as things started unrolling, unraveling, we sort of understood that, hey, we might be up here a little bit longer.
“And that’s what our job is. We have both been in the military, both Navy guys, our deployments have been extended. You do what’s right for the team, and what was right for the team is to stay up here and be expedition crew members for the International Space Station.”
Last September, Boeing successfully brought the Starliner down by remote control and NASA launched the Crew 9 mission aboard a Crew Dragon carrying just two crew members, Hague and Gorbunov, along with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams.
The Starliner astronauts joined the Crew 9 expedition and originally expected to return to Earth in February after arrival of the next Crew Dragon in the crew rotation sequence. But the Crew 10 Dragon, a new vehicle making its first flight, ran into problems that delayed launch, and Crew 9’s return, to the end of March.
NASA eventually decided to switch Crew 10 to a different Dragon, enabling a launch on March 12, a few weeks earlier than the previous late March target. Stich said the capsule swap and slightly earlier launch date were not the result of any outside pressure.
The decision “really was driven by a lot of other factors,” Stich said. “We were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the President and Mr. Musk.”
Said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s chief of spaceflight operations at agency Headquarters: “I can verify that Steve had been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a good month before there was any discussion outside of NASA.”
“But the president’s interest sure added energy to the conversation, and it’s great to have a president who’s interested in what we’re doing.”
Bill Harwood has been covering the U.S. space program full-time since 1984, first as Cape Canaveral bureau chief for United Press International and now as a consultant for CBS News.
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