By Joey Roulette
(Reuters) – NASA is set to launch a SpaceX rocket from Florida on Wednesday carrying a replacement crew for the International Space Station in a mission that sets up the return to Earth of U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – stuck in space for nine months after a trip on Boeing’s faulty Starliner.
The U.S. space agency moved up the mission by two weeks after President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, called for Wilmore and Williams to be brought back earlier than NASA had planned.
A planned eight-day stay on the orbiting station has dragged on for Wilmore and Williams, a pair of veteran astronauts and U.S. Navy test pilots. Starliner returned to Earth without them last year.
SpaceX’s rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 7:48 p.m. ET (2348 GMT) with a crew of two U.S. astronauts and one astronaut each from Japan and Russia.
Wilmore and Williams have been working on research and maintenance with the space station’s other astronauts and have remained safe, according to NASA. Williams told reporters in a March 4 call that she is looking forward to seeing her family and pet dogs upon returning home.
“It’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” Williams said of her family. “We’re here, we have a mission – we’re just doing what we do every day, and every day is interesting because we’re up in space and it’s a lot of fun.”
The flight, known as Crew-10, normally would be considered a routine astronaut rotation. Instead, it has become entangled in politics as Trump and Musk have sought – without offering evidence – to blame former President Joe Biden for the delayed return of Wilmore and Williams.
The demands by Trump and Musk for an earlier return were an unusual intervention in NASA’s human spaceflight operations. The mission previously had a target date of March 26, but NASA swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule with a different one that would be ready sooner.
When the new crew arrives aboard the station, Wilmore and Williams and two others – NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov – can return to Earth in a capsule that has been attached to the station since September, as part of the prior Crew-9 mission.
Wilmore and Williams could not leave until the new Crew-10 craft arrives in order to keep the ISS staffed with enough U.S. astronauts for maintenance, according to NASA. The departure from the station is expected on Sunday, with a return to Earth later that day or Monday.
Wilmore and Williams flew to the station in June as the first test crew of Boeing’s Starliner, which suffered propulsion system issues in space. NASA deemed it too risky for the astronauts to fly home on the Boeing craft. This led to the current plan to bring them home in a SpaceX capsule.
Boeing built Starliner under a $4.5 billion contract with NASA to compete with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which since 2020 has been the U.S. space agency’s only vehicle for sending ISS crew members to orbit from American soil. Last year’s mission had marked Starliner’s first test flight with astronauts aboard, a requirement before NASA could certify the capsule for routine astronaut missions.
Starliner’s development has been plagued with engineering issues and cost overruns since 2019, putting it far behind SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, which was developed under a similar NASA contract worth at least $4 billion.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)
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