CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The two astronauts stuck on the International Space Station since June welcomed their new journey home with Sunday’s arrival of a SpaceX capsule.
SpaceX began the rescue mission Saturday with a reduced crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness high above Botswana as the two craft hovered 260 miles (420 kilometers) above Earth.
NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX after concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first Starliner test flight with a crew, and NASA decided that propeller failures and helium leaks that appeared after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to risk the return of the test pilots. So the Starliner returned to Earth empty earlier this month.
The kite carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian space agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain on the space station until February, turning what would have been a week-long trip for Wilmore and Williams into a mission lasting more than eight months.
Two NASA astronauts were pulled from the mission to make way for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.
NASA likes to replace its station crews every six months or so. SpaceX has provided the taxi service since the company’s first astronaut flight in 2020. NASA also hired Boeing for shuttle flights after the space shuttles were retired, but flawed software and other Starliner problems led to years of delays and more than $1 billion in repairs.
Starliner inspections are underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with review of post-flight data sets to begin this week.
“We’re a long way from saying, ‘Hey, we’re writing off Boeing,'” NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free said at a pre-launch briefing.
The arrival of two fresh astronauts means that the four who have been up there since March can now return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule in just over a week. Their stay was extended a month due to the Starliner turbulence.
Although Saturday’s launch went well, SpaceX said the rocket’s spent upper stage fell outside its intended impact zone in the Pacific Ocean due to a bad engine firing. The company has halted all Falcon launches until it figures out what went wrong.
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