2 weeks Ago
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams are finally scheduled to return to Earth after more than nine months on board the International Space Station (ISS). Their return trip is scheduled for Tuesday, March 18, in the evening (GMT), NASA said on Sunday. SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov docked with International Space Station, Space X CEO Elon Musk announced on Sunday.
Crew-10 will join the Expedition 72 crew of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Don Petitt, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore and Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner, according to the statement released by NASA. The number of crew aboard the space station will rise to 11 people before Crew-9 members Hague, Williams, Wilmore, and Gorbunov return to Earth after the crew handover period. On Friday, SpaceX and NASA launched a mission to bring back US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore from the ISS, where they have been stranded for nine months.
The lift-off took place at 7:03 ET on Friday, with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft on the Crew-10 mission. The launch came after US President Donald Trump urged SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to rescue the stranded astronauts sooner than NASA had planned. He has repeatedly accused former US President Joe Biden of abandoning them in space.
On March 7, Trump said that he has authorised Elon Musk to bring back American astronauts- Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore who have been stranded at the International Space station since June last year. Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams have been stranded on the ISS for nine months after reaching there in June last year. They were supposed to stay there for about a week.
The astronauts were transported from Earth to the ISS aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft However, the spacecraft came back to Earth unmanned in September. This came after Starliner faced "helium leaks" and "issues with the spacecraft reaction control thrusters" while docking with the ISS, Fox News reported. (with inputs from ANI).
