Washington:
A couple of astronauts will be one step closer to finally returning home when the next team is launched for the International Space Station on Friday.
NASA and Spacex point to take off at 7:03 PM (2303 GMT) of a Falcon 9 rocket that carries a spacecraft of dragons in the CREW-10 mission, after a technical problem with the earth systems prevented the launch on Wednesday.
CREW-10 takes an international team of four members ready to carry out scientific experiments in the orbital laboratory, but the greatest interest comes from the fact that its arrival allows others to leave.
NASA’s duo Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, Navy veteran astronauts and former pilots of Navy, have been stuck on board the ISS since June after the Boeing Starliner spacecraft they were testing on their first crew flight developed propulsion problems and it was considered not to fly them to fly back.
The Starliner returned empty, without experiencing more important problems.
What was destined to have been a one -day trip for Wilmore and Williams has now lasted more than nine months.
Its stay has been longer than the standard rotation of the ISS for astronauts of approximately six months, but even much shorter than the 371-day United States spatial record established by NASA Frank Rubio astronaut of 2022-2023, or the World Cosmonaut’s record of Russian Cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov, who spent 437 continuous continuous days at the MIR space station since 1994-1995.
Even so, the unexpected nature of their prolonged permanence away from their families (they had to receive additional clothes and personal care items because they had not packed enough, it has obtained interest and sympathy.
He has also become a political point of view in recent times, since President Donald Trump and his nearby advisor, Elon Musk, who leads Spacex, has suggested that former President Joe Biden “abandoned” the couple intentionally and rejected a plan to bring them back before.
‘Maybe they love each other’
That statement caused a uproar in the space community, especially because Musk did not provide any details.
The plan for the return of the duo has not changed since they were reallocated to the Spacex crew, which arrived in September aboard another dragon that carried only two crew members, instead of the usual four, to leave space for Wilmore and Williams.
Danish astronaut Andreas Mogensen said this in X, just for Musk to make fun of him with an insult by people with mental disabilities.
Some retired astronauts rushed to Mogensen’s defense, while Wilmore seemed to support Musk, saying that his comments must have been “objectives” even though he was not aware of any detail.
Trump himself has been making waves for his strange comments, referring to Williams, a former naval captain decorated, like “the woman with wild hair” and even suggesting that the two have fallen in love.
“They have been left there, I hope you like them, maybe I love, I don’t know,” he said during a recent white house conference.
Only once the crew-10 spacecraft arrives, the crew can leave the spacecraft. The delivery periods generally last a few days, and a previous plan would have seen CREW-9 start on Sunday for Splashdown off the Florida coast, although it is not clear if that timeline is still feasible.
Together with Wilmore and Williams, NASA Astronaut Nasa Hague and Russian Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will also be aboard the dragon capsule that returns.
The space remains a cooperation area between the United States and Russia despite the Ukraine conflict, with cosmonauts that travel to the ISS aboard the dragons and astronauts of the Spacex crew that do the same through the Soyuz capsules launched from Kazakhstan.
The crew team-10 is formed by NASA Astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi from Japan and Kirill Peskov in Russia.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a union feed).
