Astronauts who got stuck at an international space station for over nine months are getting closer to earth. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were trapped at the station after the failure of their transport capsule. On Thursday, the ISS is expected to make a vehicle that will take them home.
On Wednesday at 19.48 local time from the Space Center of John F. Kennedy in Florida, the Crew-10 mission is to start, carried out jointly by NASA and Spacex. In Poland there will be 48 minutes after midnight on Thursday. The Falcon 9 rocket will be a Crew Dragon capsule with a crew of four to an international space station, but it is not their journey that raises the greatest emotions.
“We were prepared for a long stay”
On board the Crew Dragon capsule, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams will return to the ground. The astronauts arrived at the ISS on board the Boeing Starliner capsule at the beginning of June 2024, and their mission was to last only eight days. However, the vehicle had serious technical problems that prevented it from being reused in a manned mission. As a result, the Astronauts' mission extended to over nine months.
– We were prepared for a long stay, even though we planned to stay briefly – said Barry “Butch” Wilmore at the beginning of March during a press conference – this is what space flights are about, planning unpredictable events and that is what we did – he added.
If everything goes according to plan, the Crew-10 crew will do on Thursday at an international space station. The current crew will transfer their duties to new astronauts. If the weather is favorable, on March 16 Crew Dragon will land off the coast of Florida. In addition to Wilmore and Williams on board the capsule will be astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksander Gorbunow, who have been on the ISS since September.
Source of the main photo: Robert Markowitz/NASA