CAPE CAAVERAL, Florida, USA (AP) The two astronauts who have been stranded on the International Space Station since June welcomed Sunday the SpaceX capsule in which they will travel back to Earth.
SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a reduced crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in the darkness as both spacecraft orbited 426 kilometers (265 miles) above Botswana.
NASA opted to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth aboard SpaceX amid concerns about the safety of its Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first manned Starliner flight, and the space agency decided that the thruster failures and helium leaks that occurred after takeoff were too serious and their cause was not sufficiently understood to put the pilots at risk. So Starliner came back empty a few weeks ago.
The Dragon carrying NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain on the space station until February, turning what was supposed to be a week-long trip for Wilmore and Williams into an over-the-top mission. of eight months.
Two NASA astronauts were removed from the mission to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return trip.
NASA typically replaces its station crew approximately every six months. SpaceX has provided the shuttle service since the company’s first crewed flight in 2020. NASA also contracted Boeing for shuttle flights following the retirement of the space shuttles, but faulty software and other problems with the Starliner caused years of delays and repairs costing more than a billion dollars.
The Starliner is already being inspected at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and post-flight data reviews are scheduled to begin this week.
“We’re a long way from saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to rule out Boeing,'” NASA associate administrator Jim Free said in a pre-launch briefing.
The arrival of two new astronauts means that the four who have been there since March will be able to return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule in just over a week. His stay was extended by a month due to problems with Starliner.
Although Saturday’s liftoff went off without a hitch, SpaceX reported that the rocket’s discarded upper stage ended up outside the planned impact zone in the Pacific due to an engine misfire. The company has suspended all Falcon launches until it figures out what went wrong.
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