After more than eight months in space, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are counting down the days until a SpaceX Dragon capsule can launch to the International Space Station and bring them home. Concerns have now been raised about their rescue rocket, however, and a switch of spacecraft could actually mean that the pair will return home sooner than expected.
Wilmore and Williams launched to the ISS aboard the doomed Boeing Starliner craft way back in June 2024. The pair meant to spend around 10 days in orbit, but issues with the thrusters on the Boeing craft meant that it returned to Earth without them and they have been living on the ISS ever since.
Space X was due to launch a crewed Dragon capsule to the ISS in March to take new astronauts to the station and bring Wilmore and Williams home. Issues with the rocket have now been uncovered that mean a rethink is in order, reports Ars Technica.
Crews working on the fifth Crew Dragon space craft have unearthed battery problems with the rocket that mean it won’t be used for the rescue mission. Instead, SpaceX will reshuffle its rockets and use a different craft to bring forward the launch, as Ars Technica explains:
At that point the pair joined the Crew-9 mission, alongside NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, and were scheduled to fly home in February. However, there was a late-developing technical issue with a new Dragon vehicle SpaceX is building, C213. Its first flight was to be Crew-10, the next NASA mission to the station. These four astronauts were to relieve Crew-9, allowing Butch and Suni to fly home. In December, NASA publicly announced a delay of the Crew-10 launch to no earlier than “late March.” This would bring Crew-9 home in early April.
SpaceX and NASA are still working to resolve the C213 Dragon issue, which may be related to batteries on the spacecraft. NASA now believes the vehicle will not be ready for its debut launch until late April. Therefore, according to sources at the agency, NASA has decided to swap vehicles for Crew-10. The space agency has asked SpaceX to bring forward the C210 vehicle, which returned to Earth last March after completing the Crew-7 mission.
All this means that the rocket that SpaceX originally planed to use to rescue Wilmore and Williams now won’t, and an older Dragon craft will make the journey instead. Got it? Good.
NASA is now targeting a launch of around March 12 to save the stranded astronauts. This would mean Wilmore and Williams could be back on solid ground as early as March 19, by which point they’ll have spent a whopping 286 days in space as a result of Boeing’s rocket failure.
As you’d expect, the rescue mission has already been politicized by the new administration, adds Futurism. Donald Trump claimed that he’s personally tasked Elon Musk with saving the pair, as though the billionaire will pilot the rocket there himself.
In actual fact, the rescue mission was planned months ago, and the contingency plan to use the Endurance craft should any issues arise was formed under the Biden administration, which Trump obviously hasn’t shouted about:
In other words, Musk and president Donald Trump have both politicized the issue — despite SpaceX and NASA’s ongoing struggles to develop the C213 Crew Dragon spacecraft being the messiest part of the return mission at this point.
To be clear, none of this has much to do with the Trump administration swooping in to heroically rescue Wilmore and Williams. As Berger points out, the pair’s return journey was already ratified in August, over five months ago. Even the contingency plan to use a different vehicle in case C213 wasn’t ready was set in motion before Trump took office.
If you’re going to plead ignorance over supposedly-awful trade deals that you negotiated and diversity practices you were responsible for, then why stop there? Trump clearly thinks he can hop on any old bandwagon and claim the credit, despite what the history books might say.