Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, two US astronauts who have been stranded on the orbital laboratory for nine months, could soon be brought home thanks to the launch of a long-awaited crew to the ISS by NASA and SpaceX on Friday.
Wilmore and Williams, both seasoned NASA astronauts and former US Navy test pilots, will be replaced by the four astronauts on board SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, which took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03 p.m. ET (2303 GMT) in June. The Falcon 9 was the first to deliver Boeing’s malfunctioning Starliner capsule to the ISS.
Friday’s Crew-10 trip, which would otherwise be a standard crew rotation flight, is a long-awaited first step toward returning the astronaut pair to Earth. It is a component of a plan that NASA established last year, and President Donald Trump has made it more urgent.
After the launch, Dina Contellam, the deputy manager of NASA’s ISS program, told reporters that Wilmore and Williams were sleeping as part of their regular routine on the station when the Crew-10 was launched. Wilmore and Williams, Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, and NASA astronaut Nick Hague are expected to leave as early as 4 a.m. ET (0800 GMT) on Sunday following the Crew-10 astronauts’ arrival at the ISS on Saturday at 11:30 p.m. ET.
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