Two days after a disappointing launch scrub, a replacement space station crew was cleared for blastoff Friday on a flight that will set the stage for Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to finally come home after nearly 300 days in space.
Hoping for better luck the second time around, Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov planned to strap into their Crew Dragon capsule and take off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:03 p.m. EST.
NASA
A launch attempt Wednesday was called off 45 minutes before liftoff because of problems verifying the behavior of hydraulically powered clamp arms that hold the top of the rocket to its launch pad support tower. The tower leans back from the rocket at liftoff and the clamp arms must be fully retracted.
SpaceX purged the hydraulic lines to clear the system for launch, but given the time needed to troubleshoot and resolve the issue, along with predicted high winds Thursday, NASA and SpaceX targeted Friday for the crew’s second try.
Given an on-time liftoff, the Crew Dragon will carry out an autonomous rendezvous with the space station, catching up with the lab Saturday night and moving in for docking at the space station’s forward port at 11:30 p.m.
NASA
They’ll be welcomed aboard by 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.
Hague and Gorbunov were launched aboard the Crew 9 Dragon in September. Two NASA astronauts who originally planned to be on that flight were bumped from the mission to free up two seats for Wilmore and Williams. They became part of Crew 9 and worked with Hague and Gorbunov for the duration of their six-month mission.
The Crew 9 fliers plan to spend two days familiarizing their replacements with the intricacies of space station operation before boarding their own Crew Dragon, the same one that carried Hague and Gorbunov to the station last September, for the trip home.
The flight plan calls for undocking Tuesday, setting the stage for re-entry and splashdown off Florida’s Gulf Coast next weekend. By that point, Wilmore and Williams will have logged about 290 days — 9.7 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 around 174 days, depending on the landing date.
“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.”
NASA
The Starliner astronauts have “just done a phenomenal job,” Stich said, “and so we’re excited to bring them back.”
Wilmore and Williams were launched aboard a Boeing Starliner capsule on 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 did not produce the expected thrust.
The astronauts originally planned to spend about eight days in space, but NASA and Boeing, the Starliner’s builder, 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 ruled that option out. Instead, 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, meanwhile, successfully returned to Earth in September, kicking off hands-on troubleshooting and ongoing work to prepare for the eventual resumption of flights.
The Starliner astronauts took the news of their 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 in an in-flight interview. “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.”
NASA
President Trump blamed the extended mission on the Biden administration, which he said had “abandoned” the Starliner crew.
“Biden left them up there,” Trump told reporters from the Oval Office on March 6. “We have two astronauts that are stuck in space. I have asked Elon (Musk), 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 that Mr. Trump was referring to will not be bringing Wilmore and Williams back to Earth. It it is assigned to 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 along with Hague and Gorbunov.
Musk said earlier he offered to launch a mission to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth earlier, but the offer, he said, was turned down for political reasons. NASA managers say they never heard of such an offer and that the current plan causes the least disruption to station operations and downstream crew rotation flights.
While NASA could have brought Crew 9 down earlier aboard the Crew 9 Dragon, 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. “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.”
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.'”