NASA has announced that Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, the astronauts stranded on the ISS International Space Station since June 2024, will finally return home on a SpaceX re-entry flight scheduled for March 12. Two others will return along with them, Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov of Roscosmos, the Russian Federation government agency responsible for the space program and aerospace research.
Williams and Wilmore had departed on the maiden flight of the Starliner spacecraft, which the U.S. aerospace company Boeing designed and built to carry crews into orbit. Upon arriving at the ISS, however, the vehicle reported several malfunctions that forced NASA to return the spacecraft unmanned.
“We are anticipating the planned launch and return dates for the next crew rotation missions,” writes NASA, which in December announced a return for late March 2025. Crew-10 is now scheduled to launch at 7:48 p.m. Wednesday, March 12, pending mission preparation and completion of the flight readiness certification process.
The astronauts stranded on the ISS will still have to wait a few days before returning to Earth to complete handover procedures with the Crew-10 expedition crew consisting of Kirill Peskov of the Roscosmos agency, NASA pilot Nichole Ayers, NASA commander Anne McClain, and specialist Takuya Onishi of the Japanese agency Jaxa.
“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges. Our operational flexibility is made possible by the unique partnership between NASA and SpaceX and the agility SpaceX continues to demonstrate to safely meet the agency’s emerging needs,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
