Finally! NASA and SpaceX launch Crew-10 mission to bring 'stranded' ISS astronauts back to Earth

NASA has launched its Crew-10 mission, bringing relief to the U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — who’ve been stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for the last nine months — and finally allowing them to return to Earth.

The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:04 p.m. EDT on Friday (March 14), as part of a routine ISS staff rotation.

Riding aboard its top-mounted Dragon capsule are four astronauts: NASA’s Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain, Roscosmos astronaut Kirill Peskov and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Takuya Onishi. If everything goes to plan, the capsule will dock at the ISS at 11:30 p.m. EDT Saturday (March 15).

Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS as part of Boeing's first Starliner Crew Test Flight. Starliner blasted off on its inaugural crewed test flight from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5, 2024. But not long after entering orbit, a number of issues cropped up — including five helium leaks and five failures of its reaction control system (RCS) thrusters.

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This caused the mission, originally slated to last as few as eight days, to drag on for more than two months before NASA announced its abandonment on Aug. 24. The Starliner capsule undocked from the ISS on Sep. 6, returning to Earth without a crew.

While awaiting the Crew-10 rotation, Wilmore and Williams have been performing a number of maintenance tasks and participating in scientific projects.

Their stay has been largely safe but not entirely without incident. On June 27, a defunct Russian satellite broke apart in orbit, sending debris toward the ISS and forcing Williams and Wilmore, along with the other seven astronauts on board, to take cover inside their respective space capsules.

Following a handover ceremony from Crew 9 to Crew 10, Wilmore and Williams, along with the NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos's Aleksandr Gorbunov, will return home aboard the docked Crew-9 capsule on March 19. The Starliner astronauts’ total time in space will amount to nearly 300 consecutive days — nowhere near the current record of 437 days set by Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov in 1995, but still a long haul.

Tonight’s launch is the third attempt to launch the Crew-10 mission, the first on Wednesday (March 12) being scrubbed after a hydraulic system issue and the next on Thursday (March 13) being grounded by high winds and precipitation across the rocket’s flight path, according to NASA.

"We came up prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short," Wilmore said during a news conference beamed back from the ISS on March 4. "That's what we do in human spaceflight. That's what your nation's human spaceflight program's all about — planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that."