NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore (right) and Suni Williams wear Boeing spacesuits and leave the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Inspection Building at the Kennedy Space Center for the Space Force at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The station’s Launch Complex 41 boarded the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft for a manned flight test launch on June 5, 2024.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo | Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo AFP | Getty Images
Two NASA astronauts Stuck on the International Space Station Since their boeing company The spacecraft encountered problems in June and will have to stay there longer, the agency announced Tuesday.
NASA has postponed the launch of the next group of astronauts to the International Space Station from February to no earlier than late March to give more time to “finish processing” of the new SpaceX spacecraft that will be used for the mission.
The four crew members aboard the space station must wait for the arrival of the next crew before setting off in individual SpaceX Dragon capsules. They include NASA astronauts sonny williams Butch Wilmore took part in the challenging first test flight of Boeing’s Starliner aircraft.
The pair originally planned to spend about a week on the space station, but ended up living and working in orbit for more than nine months, including time added by the latest delay.
New astronauts typically overlap briefly with departing astronauts aboard the ISS, a so-called handover period, during which astronauts can exchange information about ongoing science experiments, maintenance projects and other protocols.
When Williams and Wilmore finally depart after the handover, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov will fly home with them.
The new Crew Dragon capsule, expected to launch in late March, will arrive at NASA’s processing facility in Florida in early January, officials said.
“The manufacturing, assembly, testing and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking effort that requires a high level of attention to detail,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. said in a statement.
When the capsule launches – a mission called Crew-10 – it is expected to carry NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nicole Ayers, Russian cosmonauts Kirill Peskov and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi. Until then, the four will continue training for the mission at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA said.
