NASA’s upcoming launch of its Crew-10 mission is the final step to returning the Starliner astronauts home after nine months of being stranded with no ride back to Earth. The mission will finally relieve the two astronauts from their prolonged time in space, but it’s not the kind of rescue mission Donald Trump is making it out to be.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission will deliver a new crew to the International Space Station (ISS), allowing NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return to Earth along with the two members of Crew-9, who reached the orbital lab in September of last year. Crew-10 is set for launch on Wednesday at 7:48 p.m. ET from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft expected to dock at the space station on Thursday around 6 a.m. ET.
The Dragon spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) mission specialist Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the orbiting laboratory for a four-month-long mission.
The arrival of the new crew is notable in that it’ll finally allow the Starliner crew to return home following a brief four-day handover period. Wilmore and Williams launched to the ISS aboard Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner on June 5, 2024, but the spacecraft was later deemed unfit to fly the crew back to Earth. Following the Starliner debacle, NASA came up with a plan to make sure the two stranded astronauts would return home safely. But with any space mission, things are complicated (and expensive), which meant the Starliner astronauts would have to spend an extra nine months on board the ISS
Shortly after taking office, President Trump saw an opportunity to talk trash about his predecessor by claiming that he is working on a rescue mission for the two Starliner astronauts. Trump announced that he had asked SpaceX founder and CEO Musk to “go get the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” he wrote on Truth Social.
In doing so, Trump ignored the effort already in motion by NASA to bring the astronauts home. On September 28, 2024, NASA launched its Crew-9 mission with two astronauts instead of four (the two being NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov), docking at the ISS on the following day. The two empty seats were reserved for Williams and Wilmore, who were set to return alongside the Crew-9 astronauts in February. The plan did face some trouble, though, as technical issues delayed the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission, postponing the crew handover. That meant that Crew-9, alongside Williams and Wilmore, would not be able to depart the ISS until Crew-10 is on the space station sometime in April.
NASA ended up switching the SpaceX crew spacecraft to bring the two Starliner astronauts back later this month. Whether it was prompted by Trump’s nonsensical rant or not, the launch shuffle saved the astronauts around two extra weeks of being in space. So if that is the so-called rescue mission in question, then it’s really not much.
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