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NASA, SpaceX launch mission to bring astronauts Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore home
Four astronauts are heading to the International Space Station on the Crew-10 mission to replace Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore and two others.
NASA and SpaceX successfully launched a long-awaited crewed mission on Friday to bring back US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months.
A Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon capsule fixed to its top blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03pm (local time), carrying a four-member team bound for the orbital outpost.
The four astronauts - NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov - are heading to the International Space Station on the Crew-10 mission to replace Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore and two others.
Once their spacecraft arrives and docks at the ISS on March 15, the four astronauts will spend a few days adjusting before taking over operations from Crew-9, which would then depart no sooner than March 19.
SpaceX and the US space agency had planned to launch a replacement crew of four astronauts from Florida on March 12, a mission called Crew-10, but a last-minute problem with the rocket's ground systems forced a delay.
On March 13, NASA said that SpaceX had resolved the issue - flushing a suspected pocket of air out of a hydraulic clamp arm - and that the weather was 95% per cent favourable for a launch on March 15.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams have been stranded in space for nine months following their trip aboard Boeing’s Starliner. The two astronauts, along with US Navy test pilots, became the first humans to test-fly Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to the ISS.
However, what was supposed to be an eight-day mission, was significantly prolonged due to technical issues with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. The Starliner instead returned empty, without experiencing further major issues.
The mission has also become entangled in politics as US President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk, SpaceX's CEO, blamed former president Joe Biden left the astronauts on the station for political reasons.
