More than nine months after departing for what they believed to be an eight-day stay in space, Starliner astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams will return to Earth as NASA is finally prepared to deploy its next space station crew.
At 7:48 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, pilot Nichole Ayers, and Crew 10 commander Anne McClain are set to launch from historic pad 39 at the Kennedy Space Center. If everything goes according to plan, they will dock at the forward port of the lab at 6 a.m. on Thursday, catching up with the space station.
In addition to cosmonauts Alexsey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner, and NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who were launched in September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, Crew 9 commander Nick Hague, cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, Wilmore, and Williams will be waiting to greet them on board.
Before Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore, and Williams undock on March 16 to return to Earth, McClain and her crewmates will spend two days receiving an in-depth briefing from Crew 9 on the complexities of space station operations. In order to preserve the lab’s food supplies, mission managers cut the “handover” period this time around, which is typically five days or so.
Although the Crew 10 mission has been overshadowed by the ongoing story of the “stranded” Starliner astronauts, McClain stated that she and her crewmates started training for their mission in 2023 and were all excited to finally launch into space. Ayers and Peskov are flying for the first time, while McClain and Onishi are veterans of the space station.
All four are former commercial or military pilots. Ayers, an Air Force major, is a seasoned F-22 Raptor pilot, while McClain, an active-duty Army colonel, was a combat helicopter pilot before to joining NASA. Peskov is a seasoned commercial 757 pilot, and Onishi flew Boeing 767 jetliners during his time as a commercial pilot in Japan.
“To keep the space station operating, we are going to have both planned and unplanned maintenance,” McClain stated. Both inside and outside the space station, we have a ton of scientific experiments. We have spacewalks. In addition to the possibility of hosting private astronaut missions, we have visiting vehicles.
“They’re ready to come home”
“To be honest, I am really looking forward to breaking bread with those guys, talking to them, and giving them big hugs,” McClain said of Wilmore and Williams. We have a long history together. We are prepared to ascend. They are prepared to return home.
Steve Stich, head of the commercial crew program that manages Boeing’s Starliner and SpaceX Crew Dragons, stated, “This is a huge mission for us on Crew 10.” “They are all big, but this began with Crew 9 when we had two seats available when we launched that mission, and we had Butch and Suni in those seats.”
Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore, and Williams might undock on March 16 and land as early as March 17 if Crew 10 launches on schedule. If this is the case, the Starliner astronauts will have spent 285 days, or 9.5 months, in space during a journey that was initially anticipated to last just over a week. The total time spent in orbit by Hague and Gorbunov will be 170 days.
Due to issues with the Soyuz spacecraft that sent him into orbit, astronaut Frank Rubio spent 371 days in space, setting the U.S. record for the longest single spaceflight. He had to extend his mission and return home on a different Soyuz, just like the Starliner crew.
In any event, President Trump’s and Elon Musk’s constant criticism of the Biden administration for the Starliner crew’s situation has turned what would have been a fairly routine crew rotation—sending up four crew members to replace four others finishing a five- to six-month station visit—into political theater.