NASA said Tuesday that the two astronauts who have been stranded on the ISS since their Boeing spacecraft malfunctioned in June will have to stay there even longer.
To give additional time to finish processing a new SpaceX spaceship that will be used for the mission, NASA has rescheduled the next astronaut crew’s flight to the ISS from February to no sooner than late March.
Before leaving the station in a different SpaceX Dragon capsule, four crew members must wait for the next crew to arrive. Among them are NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who took off on the maiden test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which was fraught with difficulties.
With the additional time for the most recent delay, the two would have lived and worked in orbit for more than nine months, compared to their initial plan of spending roughly a week there.
During what is known as a “handover period,” new crews usually spend a brief amount of time at the ISS overlapping with departing crews. This allows astronauts to share information on ongoing maintenance work, science experiments, and other procedures.
Following that handover, Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov and NASA astronaut Nick Hague will accompany Williams and Wilmore on their flight home.
According to officials, the new Dragon spacecraft, which is scheduled to launch in late March, should reach NASA’s Florida processing center in early January.
A new spacecraft’s fabrication, assembly, testing, and final integration are laborious processes that demand meticulous attention to detail, according to a statement from Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, and Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi are anticipated to board the capsule when it launches the Crew-10 mission. According to NASA, the foursome will continue their mission-related training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston until then.
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