NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Nick Hague deliver a speech via video link during the Opening Ceremony of the United Nations climate change conference COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan November 12, 2024.
NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Nick Hague deliver a speech via video link during the Opening Ceremony of the United Nations climate change conference COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan November 12, 2024.
Just over a day after blasting off, a SpaceX crew capsule arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, delivering the replacements for NASA's two stuck astronauts.
The four newcomers — representing the US, Japan and Russia — will spend the next few days learning the station's ins and outs from Butch Wilmore and Indian-American Sunita Williams.
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Then the two will strap into their own SpaceX capsule later this week to close out an unexpected extended mission that began last June.
Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week when they launched on Boeing's first astronaut flight. They hit the nine-month mark earlier this month.
The Boeing Starliner capsule encountered so many problems that NASA insisted it come back empty, leaving its test pilots behind to wait for a SpaceX lift.
Their ride arrived in late September with a downsized crew of two and two empty seats reserved for the leg back. But more delays resulted when their replacements' brand new capsule needed extensive battery repairs. An older capsule took its place, pushing up their return by a couple weeks to mid-March.
Weather permitting, the SpaceX capsule carrying Wilmore, Williams and two other astronauts will undock from the space station no earlier than Wednesday and splash down off Florida's coast.
As test pilots for Boeing's new Starliner capsule, Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week or so when they launched from Cape Canaveral on June 5. A series of helium leaks and thruster failures marred their trip to the space station, setting off months of investigation by NASA and Boeing on how best to proceed.
Eventually ruling it unsafe, NASA ordered Starliner to fly back empty last September and moved Wilmore and Williams to a SpaceX flight due back in February. Their return was further delayed when SpaceX's brand new capsule needed extensive battery repairs before launching their replacements. To save a few weeks, SpaceX switched to a used capsule, moving up Wilmore and Williams' homecoming to mid-March.
Already capturing the world's attention, their unexpectedly long mission took a political twist when President Donald Trump and SpaceX's Elon Musk vowed earlier this year to accelerate the astronauts' return and blamed the former administration for stalling it.
Retired Navy captains who have lived at the space station before, Wilmore and Williams have repeatedly stressed that they support the decisions made by their NASA bosses since last summer. The two helped keep the station running — fixing a broken toilet, watering plants and conducting experiments — and even went out on a spacewalk together. With nine spacewalks, Williams set a new record for women: the most time spent spacewalking over a career.
A last-minute hydraulics issue delayed Wednesday's initial launch attempt. Concern arose over one of the two clamp arms on the Falcon rocket's support structure that needs to tilt away right before liftoff. SpaceX later flushed out the arm's hydraulics system, removing trapped air.
The duo's extended stay has been hardest, they said, on their families — Wilmore's wife and two daughters, and Williams' husband and mother. Besides reuniting with them, Wilmore, a church elder, is looking forward to getting back to face-to-face ministering and Williams can't wait to walk her two Labrador retrievers.
“We appreciate all the love and support from everybody,” Williams said in an interview earlier this week. “This mission has brought a little attention. There's goods and bads to that. But I think the good part is more and more people have been interested in what we're doing” with space exploration.