WASHINGTON — SpaceX launched a crew to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday, a closely watched mission that would allow marooned astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to finally return home.
The company’s Falcon 9 rocket topped with the crew’s Dragon capsule launched shortly after 7pm New York time from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (Nasa) Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.
The mission crew includes two Nasa astronauts, Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, as well as Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.
Nasa maintains a continuous, rotating presence on the ISS to help manage the station's operations and research. That means the Crew-10 astronauts must arrive at the station and go through a roughly two-day handover period before the current crew, which includes Wilmore and Williams, can depart.
Then, Williams and Wilmore are slated to board a capsule already docked at the station and head back to Earth with other crew members no earlier than March 19.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS last June on a Boeing Co Starliner spacecraft and were initially slated to stay for about a week. But after Starliner suffered technical difficulties on the journey there, Nasa declared that it was too risky to bring the astronauts home on the craft.
Instead, the space agency stated that the astronauts would ride back to Earth on a SpaceX craft, extending Wilmore and Williams’ stay for about nine months.
Their return home, set to happen after the safe arrival and transition of Crew-10, has captured national attention and concern, including from United States President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the chief executive officer of SpaceX.
The arriving Crew-10 is planned to remain on board the ISS until the fall, conducting a wide range of scientific research, including on lunar navigation, material flammability, and the human body’s reaction to space.