280 days and counting: Sunita Williams and other astronauts greet each other after the SpaceX capsule docked at the ISS on Sunday.
A SpaceX capsule ferried four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday on a crew-exchange mission that will allow Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to return to Earth after being stuck in orbit for over nine months.
The Dragon capsule executed choreographed manoeuvres to dock with the ISS about 267km above the Atlantic Ocean at 4.04am on Sunday, nearly 29 hours after its launch from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida aboard a Falcon rocket, also manufactured by SpaceX.
Williams, Wilmore, fellow Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexandr Gorbunov — a quartet called Crew-9 — are scheduled to use the Dragon capsule to return to Earth after a “handover” exercise. The splashdown is to occur off the Florida coast.
“We’re going to have a short handover with the Crew-9 guys coming home no earlier than Wednesday,” said Dina Contella, deputy manager for Nasa’s ISS programme.
“We’re looking for good weather, it might be later than Wednesday when they come home,” she told reporters on Saturday.
Williams and Wilmore had flown to the ISS in June last year as test pilots on the maiden crewed voyage of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. But as the Starliner approached the station, Nasa and Boeing engineers detected helium leaks and thruster issues on the spacecraft.
After tests and meetings, Nasa decided to prioritise safety and brought a crewless Starliner back to Earth in September, stretching Williams’s and Wilmore’s originally planned eight-day trip to over 280 days.
A live video from the International Space Station (Official NASA Stream) show the SpaceX crew capsule. The capsule successfully docked at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday
A live video from the International Space Station (Official NASA Stream) show the SpaceX crew capsule. The capsule successfully docked at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday
Long-term spaceflight carries enhanced risks of bone density loss, muscle atrophy, kidney damage and vision problems, among other changes the body experiences under microgravity. Astronauts can lose up to 1-2 per cent of bone density per month in the hip and spine compared to bone loss of 0.5-1 per cent in postmenopausal women and much older men on Earth, according to Nasa.
A photograph taken aboard the ISS last year in which Williams, after around four months in space, appeared gaunt with sunken cheeks and a thin frame had fuelled speculation about her health.
But Williams, in a video message in November, said she weighed the same as when she arrived at the ISS, although her body had changed a bit. She said the ISS had a bike, a treadmill and weightlifting equipment that astronauts use to maintain health
in space.
Nasa officials said on Saturday that they did not anticipate the need for any extra precautions despite Williams’s and Wilmore’s extended stay in orbit.
“Butch and Suni have been in orbit a little over 280 days — there have been crew members who’ve been in orbit longer than that…. We don’t see any need for special precautions,” Contella said.
Nasa astronaut Frank Rubio holds the record for the longest spaceflight — 371 days — according to a Nasa website on space station record holders. He is followed by Mark Vand Hei (355 days), Scott Kelly (340 days), Christina Koch (328 days) and Peggy Whitson (321 days).
Williams and Wilmore will undergo standard precautions, said Steve Stitch, manager for Nasa’s commercial launch programme.
“Every crew that comes back goes through a fluid loading protocol to make sure when they get back, their body is conditioned properly, There is nothing beyond what we’ll normally do,” Stitch told reporters during a media conference streamed via social media.
The fluid loading protocol requires astronauts to drink large amounts of water containing electrolytes, such as salts, before re-entry into Earth as a way of counteracting the fluid shifts and other physiological changes they might have experienced during spaceflight.
The Dragon capsule on Sunday delivered Nasa astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the ISS — an orbiting lab that will later this year celebrate 25 years of continuous human presence.
Williams, while working on science projects on the ISS, has also engaged in spacewalks during her trips to the space station. By January 30 this year, she had accumulated 62 hours and six minutes of spacewalk time, fourth on Nasa’s all-time list.
The 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 accused the former US administration of stalling it, an Associated Press report said on Sunday.
Williams and Wilmore, who have lived on the space station before, have repeatedly stressed that they support the decisions made by Nasa last year, the AP report said.
The duo’s extended stay has been the hardest, they said, on their families — Wilmore’s wife and two daughters, and Williams’s husband and mother.
“We appreciate all the love and support from everybody,” Williams said in an interview last week.
“This mission has brought a little attention. There’s good and bad to that. But I think the good part is (that) more and more people have been interested in what we’re doing (with space exploration).”