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The replacements for two Nasa astronauts who have been stuck at the International Space Station for nine months launched on Friday evening, paving the way for the pair’s long-awaited return.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 7.03pm ET (11.03pm GMT) in Florida carrying the four astronauts who will take over from Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been stuck on the orbital lab since June.
Nasa wants overlap between the two crews so Wilmore and Williams can fill in the newcomers on happenings onboard the ISS. That would put them on course for an undocking next week and a splashdown off the Florida coast, weather permitting.
The duo will be escorted back by astronauts who flew up on a rescue mission on SpaceX last September alongside two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.
Rocketing toward orbit from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center, the newest crew includes Nasa’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, both military pilots; and Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov, both former airline pilots. They will spend the next six months at the space station, considered the normal stint, after springing Wilmore and Williams free.
As test pilots for Boeing’s new Starliner capsule, Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week or so when they launched from Cape Canaveral on 5 June. A series of helium leaks and thruster failures marred their trip to the space station, setting off months of investigation by Nasa and Boeing on how best to proceed.
Eventually ruling it unsafe, Nasa ordered Starliner to fly back empty last September and moved Wilmore and Williams to a SpaceX flight due back in February.
Their return was further delayed when SpaceX’s brand new capsule needed extensive battery repairs before launching their replacements. To save a few weeks, SpaceX switched to a used capsule, moving up Wilmore and Williams’ homecoming to mid-March.
Already capturing the world’s attention, their unexpectedly long mission took a political twist when Donald Trump and SpaceX’s Elon Musk vowed earlier this year to accelerate the astronauts’ return and blamed the former administration for stalling it.
Retired Navy captains who have lived at the space station before, Wilmore and Williams have repeatedly stressed that they support the decisions made by their Nasa bosses since last summer.
“We came prepared to stay long, even though we planned to stay short,” Wilmore said, adding that he did not believe Nasa’s decision to keep them on the ISS had been affected by politics.
“That’s what your nation’s human spaceflight program’s all about,” he said, “planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that.”
The two helped keep the station running – fixing a broken toilet, watering plants and conducting experiments – and even went out on a spacewalk together. With nine spacewalks, Williams set a new record for women: the most time spent spacewalking over a career.
A last-minute hydraulics issue delayed Wednesday’s initial launch attempt. Concern arose over one of the two clamp arms on the Falcon rocket’s support structure that needs to tilt away right before liftoff. SpaceX later flushed out the arm’s hydraulics system, removing trapped air.
The duo’s extended stay has been hardest, they said, on their families – Wilmore’s wife and two daughters, and Williams’ husband and mother. Besides reuniting with them, Wilmore, a church elder, is looking forward to getting back to face-to-face ministering and Williams can’t wait to walk her two Labrador retrievers.
“We appreciate all the love and support from everybody,” Williams said in an interview earlier this week. “This mission has brought a little attention. There’s goods and bads to that. But I think the good part is more and more people have been interested in what we’re doing” with space exploration.
