The mission to ‘recover’ astronauts stranded in space begins

SpaceX’s mission to bring back two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) since June has started. As the BBC writes, the Dragon capsule, which has two empty seats for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, took off on Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The pair’s mission to the space station was supposed to last just eight days, but after experiencing a fault on the new Boeing Starliner they returned to the empty Earth as a precaution.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov are now flying new supplies for Butch and Suni and plan to bring them home in February. The Dragon capsule was scheduled to launch on Thursday but was delayed by Hurricane Helene, which left a trail of destruction across Florida, north of Georgia and into Tennessee and the Carolinas. SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, transports crews to and from the ISS every six months.

The docking of the Dragon capsule to the ISS is scheduled for today, Sunday 29 September, at approximately 10.30pm Italian time. Under a contract between NASA and Roscosmos, Russia’s federal space agency, Russia’s three-seater Soyuz spacecraft carry a NASA astronaut on each flight to the ISS and a cosmonaut flies on each four-seater Dragon.