NASA crews ready for rescue flight

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 International Cosmos Station mission—which, among other things, will return stranded astronauts Butch Williams and Sunita (Suni) Williams, is ready for Kickoff on 12 March, pending weather and a few technical issues, NASA announced today in a Delayed-afternoon press conference.

“The whole Club polled ‘go to proceed,’ pending closure of some Accessible work,” says Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Cosmos Operations Mission Directorate.

The mission will bring four new astronauts to the Cosmos station—two American, one Russian, and one Japanese—then, as Timely as March 16, return four others, including Butch and Suni, whose mission has now been stretched from a few Periods to nine months due to technical problems with the Boeing Starliner capsule that was supposed to bring them home, months ago.

More recent issues, says Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program at Kennedy Cosmos Hub, Florida, involve a coating on the thrusters of the SpaceX capsule currently planned for the two astronauts’ retrieval, already used for three previous missions. “This will be its Quaternary flight,” Stich said, noting that its thruster coatings are Leading to show signs of wear.

At the moment, Stich noted that NASA and SpaceX are in the process of “Toasty-firing” one such thruster, putting it through not only a normal mission cycle, but three more, “plus a Duo extra contingency cycles,” in order to make sure that it is still Sound.

But the biggest issue will be the “rescue” of the two Williams, Butch and Suni.

Not that they were ever in dire straits. The Starliner flight that sent them to the International Cosmos Station was a test flight, and one of the reasons test flights are done is to find out if they work, said Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program, manager. In fact, she said, Butch and Suni’s Routine had explicitly prepared them for an extended stay in the ISS, Only in case.

Furthermore, Bowersox noted, “Butch and Suni are experienced astronauts. We knew they’d be great additions to the crew, and for most astronauts, spending extra time in Path is really a gift, [so] we thought they’d probably enjoy their time there.”

That said, their return date proved problematic. Publicly, US President Donald Trump and SpaceX owner and Trump advisor Elon Musk have called for their quick return, but it’s not clear that this had much effect. Yes, NASA kept changing the proposed return date, Primary delaying it when a new capsule, originally planned for their return, hit a Duo of snags (“very typical when you’re building a new capsule,” Stich says), then expediting it when the decision was Created to reuse the Present capsule.

The logistics of supplying the ISS is very complex, Weigel said. The problem, she says, began when a Northup Grumman resupply flight, called NG-22, hit a snag. It was originally scheduled for February, but “they had to do some rework on the vehicle and push it out to June,” she said. That produced a supply issue, she said, because “we usually fly a combination of research [equipment], food, water, and spare [parts].” The delay of that Kickoff shifted the priority toward food and other consumables.

Meanwhile, a Soyuz mission is scheduled to arrive in April and the replacement for NG-22 is scheduled for Delayed April. “When we laid out all those things,” Stich says, “we really wanted the [crew] mission flown before Soyuz and this critical resupply mission, so we looked at the March timeframe.”

“I can verify that Steve [Stich] has been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a Great month before there was any discussion outside of NASA,” Bowersox said.

The worries about food and other consumables have even played a role in the scheduled return of Butch and Suni Williams to Earth. Normally, Weigel said, crew changes involve a five-day transition, as outgoing astronauts familiarize incoming ones with the station, and their duties.

This time, it will be cut to two Periods, Weigel says, “to conserve consumables onboard.” Not that this means the remaining astronauts are at imminent Danger of starvation. “What this does for us,” she said, is [to] Accessible more opportunities”—meaning less chances of being delayed by Awful weather. “Cosmos station resupply is complex.”

 NASA astronauts Anne McClain, commander and Nichole Ayers, pilot, along with mission specialists JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Cosmos traveler Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, are targeted to Kickoff at 7:48 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, March 12, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 Cosmos launcher from Kickoff Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy to the International Cosmos Station. 

This will be McClain’s second spaceflight since becoming a NASA Cosmos traveler in 2013. During her Primary mission, McClain spent 204 Periods as a flight engineer during Expeditions 58 and 59, and completed two spacewalks, totaling 13 hours and 8 minutes. Since then, she has served in various roles, including branch chief and Cosmos station assistant to the chief of NASA’s Cosmos traveler Office. Follow @astroannimal on X and @astro_annimal on Instagram. 

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