Sunita Williams, Butch Willmore to return to Earth from space on March 19

New Delhi:  Indian-Origin NASA astronaut Sunita Williams and colleague Butch Willmore will return to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) on March 19, after spending about 10 months in space.

Williams and Wilmore have been stuck in space since June last year due to technical problems with Boeing’s Starliner, which took them to ISS. Speaking to media from space, the astronaut duo said that they will return after the Crew-10 mission begins their journey from Earth to the ISS on March 12 for the six-month-long mission.

The Crew-10 mission will carry NASA astronauts Anne McClain, and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the space station.

After the handover, the Crew-9 mission, consisting of Williams, Wilmore, Nick Hague, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, will return to Earth. “The plan is that Crew-10 will launch on March 12, do a turnover for a week and we will return on March 19,” astronaut Willmore was quoted as saying to CNN.

While they were earlier scheduled to return on March 25, NASA and SpaceX accelerated the target launch of Crew 10 and the return of the stranded astronauts.

“The agency’s Crew-10 launch now is targeting 7:48 p.m. EDT, on March 12. The Crew-9 mission is planned for return to Earth following a several-day handover period with the newly arrived Crew-10 expedition crew,” the US space agency said.

NASA informed that the earlier launch opportunity was available after the mission management decided to use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance; and not the earlier planned Dragon spacecraft.

This comes as US President Donald Trump asked SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to facilitate the return of both Williams and Wilmore as soon as possible. Musk claimed that it was “terrible” that the pair were left “stranded” at the ISS for so long, even though NASA had already roped in SpaceX months ago to return both astronauts as part of its Crew-9 mission.

However, the astronauts stated that “they were neither stuck nor stranded in space as is being claimed”. “Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges, and we were prepared for it,” said Willmore and Williams.

Meanwhile, the earlier launch of Crew-10 is expected to delay Axiom’s planned Crew Dragon flight that is scheduled to take Subhanshu Shukla — the first Indian to ISS — along with astronauts from Poland, and Hungary to space.

–IANS