Astronauts who flew to space aboard Starliner face additional delay

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NASA has announced that it is delaying the SpaceX Crew-10 launch, a move that will keep astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — who already had their stay aboard the International Space Station unexpectedly extended — in orbit even longer.

Williams and Wilmore launched to space in June, piloting the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Their trip, expected to last about a week, ballooned into a monthslong assignment after their vehicle experienced technical issues en route to the space station and NASA determined it would be too risky to bring them home aboard the Starliner.

The astronauts have since joined Crew-9, a routine space station mission originally slated to return to Earth no earlier than February after a handoff period with Crew-10. Now, Crew-10 will get off the ground at least a month later than expected because NASA and SpaceX teams need “time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission,” according to the space agency.

“NASA and SpaceX assessed various options for managing the next crewed handover, including using another Dragon spacecraft,” NASA noted in a blog post on Tuesday. “After careful consideration, the team determined that launching Crew-10 in late March, following completion of the new Dragon spacecraft, was the best option for meeting NASA’s requirements and achieving space station objectives for 2025.”

SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission, which also includes NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov among the crew, arrived at the orbiting outpost in September. Williams and Wilmore have now been on the station for more than six months, and they will have tallied up roughly nine months in space if they return home in late March or early April.

Routine missions to the International Space Station regularly last six months. But it’s not uncommon for astronauts to get an unexpected extension to their space station visit — for days, weeks or even months.

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, for example, holds the US record for the longest continuous stay on the space station. He spent 371 days there on a mission that ended in 2023.