Starliner Astronauts Near Return as NASA, SpaceX Prepare to Rotate ISS Crew

NASA on Wednesday is scheduled to launch the SpaceX Crew-10 mission, its 10th ISS commercial crew rotation mission using SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule. Once that spacecraft and its crew arrive, Wilmore and Williams will be relieved of their orbital duties and hitch a ride on a second SpaceX Dragon that has been docked to the ISS since September. According to NASA, that vehicle could return the astronauts at any time. But the space agency elected to keep them there for safety and cost reasons.

Barring any hiccups, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Crew-10 Dragon from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday at 7:48 p.m. EST. The crew capsule will dock with the ISS Thursday morning. Leaders at NASA and SpaceX—which are both offering livestreams of the launch— gave the “go” to proceed with the mission on Tuesday.

“Over the past six weeks, the joint NASA, SpaceX team has displayed remarkable dedication, adaptability, and expertise in delivering on a unique and challenging mission,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, said in an update on Tuesday.

Wednesday’s mission wasn’t always the plan. NASA in August detailed its blueprint to return the astronauts on the Crew-9 Dragon in February, a timeline that was later pushed to March due to delays to Crew-10. It sent the spacecraft to the ISS in September with two crewmembers, rather than the usual four, to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the way down. The astronauts have integrated fully with ISS Expedition 72 and are conducting valuable research. Starliner, meanwhile, returned to Earth without a crew.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed he offered NASA an earlier return profile that was rejected because “they did not want positive press for someone who supported [President Donald] Trump. That’s it. End of story.” But former administrator Bill Nelson and deputy administrator Pam Melroy have denied receiving any such offer.

“We have no information on that, though ... what was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how that process went,” Wilmore said during an interview with CNN in February. “That's information that we simply don't have.”

Despite orbiting hundreds of miles above the Earth, Wilmore and Williams have been embroiled in a political firestorm surrounding their return.

Days after taking office in January, Trump asked Musk and SpaceX to “go get” the astronauts, whom he claimed were “virtually abandoned in space by the Biden administration.” Musk too has pinned blame on previous leadership, saying they were “left up there for political reasons.” Musk later got into a spat with ISS commander Andreas Mogensen, who called the assertion a “lie,” on his social media platform, X. Williams and Wilmore have also refuted many of Trump and Musk’s claims.

“We don’t feel abandoned,” Wilmore told CNN.

NASA is well equipped to accommodate extended missions. In 2023, for example, astronaut Frank Rubio set a U.S. spaceflight record after spending 371 days aboard the orbital laboratory. By comparison, if the Starliner astronauts depart on Sunday as expected, they will have lasted 285 days.

Williams and Wilmore have ample food, water, clothing, and other supplies courtesy of NASA Commercial Cargo deliveries. The astronauts are able to communicate with friends and family via routine phone and video calls and recently rang in the winter holiday season from orbit. They even cast their ballots in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

“If you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let’s change it to ‘prepared and committed,’” Wilmore told CNN. “That’s what we prefer.”

The four-person crew replacing Wilmore, Williams, and Crew-9 astronauts Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov on the ISS will comprise NASA’s Anne McClain and Nicole Ayers, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. It is the first spaceflight for Ayers and Peskov and the second for McClain and Onishi.

The crew will take part in NASA’s ISS Expedition 73 and assist with more than 200 microgravity research experiments. Among other tests, they will submit blood samples for analysis, study how materials burn in microgravity, and conduct Earth-to-orbit calls with students via ham radio.

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