Boeing astronaut stuck on the ISS station for another month

NASA announced on December 17 that the next crew transfer of the International Space Station (ISS) will take place as early as the end of March 2025. At that time, the Crew-10 train will take the new crew to the space station to transfer work with the old crew.

Crew-10 astronauts include Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers (NASA), Takuya Onishi (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency JAXA), Kirill Peskov (Russian Space Agency Roscosmos). After the transfer of work, astronauts Butch Wilmore, Sunita Williams, Nick Hague (NASA) and Aleksandr Gorbunov (Roscosmos) will return to Earth.

Initially, Crew-10 was scheduled to take place in February 2025, but NASA and SpaceX postponed the launch date to complete a new Dragon ship for the mission. Dragon is SpaceX’s human spacecraft model, which can carry up to 7 people into low Earth orbit.

“The process of building, assembling, testing and fully integrating a new spacecraft is meticulous, requiring close attention to detail,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. know.

This delay means that Wilmore and Williams, two astronauts who flew to the ISS on Boeing’s Starliner in June, will continue to be stuck in space. This mission was originally expected to last just over a week, but the ship encountered problems, forcing Wilmore and Williams to stay at the ISS for many more months. Finally, the empty Starliner returned in September, while the astronaut duo had to wait for the SpaceX ship to return later.

The Starliner project is already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget after a decade of development. Starliner also experienced a series of last-minute launch cancellations before carrying people into space for the first time in June. However, the flight also encountered problems and the astronauts will have to return thanks to a ship from SpaceX, a competitor of SpaceX. Boeing. The future of the Starliner train still causes many doubts and concerns.

Wilmore and Williams accidentally became long-term residents of the ISS station, but not enough to set a record. For example, Scott Kelly stayed on the ISS for 340 days, from 2015 to 2016, as part of NASA’s twin study. In 2023, Frank Rubio lives continuously for a year in orbit, becoming the first American to do so. Rubio’s stay was also unplanned because the Soyuz spacecraft (Russia) leaked. There are 6 other people who also lived more than a year in space.