Two stranded NASA astronauts, who have been stuck on the International Space Station (ISS) for seven months, just got their return mission extended again.
The launch of the next astronaut crew, Crew-10, to the ISS has been delayed from February 2025 to no earlier than late March 2025, NASA has confirmed. In a blog post published on December 17, 2024, the space agency said the change would give NASA and SpaceX teams “time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft” for the mission.
“Fabrication, assembly, testing, and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking endeavor that requires great attention to detail,” said Steve Stich, Manager, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. “We appreciate the hard work by the SpaceX team to expand the Dragon fleet in support of our missions and the flexibility of the station program and expedition crews as we work together to complete the new capsule’s readiness for flight.”
Four crew members on the station must wait for the next crew to arrive before they can leave on a SpaceX Dragon capsule. According to NASA, this allows Crew-9 to “share any lessons learned with the newly arrived crew and support a better transition”.
Currently, there are four astronauts aboard the ISS station. Two of them, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, have been stuck in space since June 2024. Their return to Earth was delayed due to technical issues with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
The two astronauts originally planned to stay on the ISS for around a week, but their mission has been extended multiple times, leaving them stranded in space for months.
Two other astronauts, Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov, arrived at the ISS in September 2024 as part of a different SpaceX Crew-9 mission. The four NASA astronauts will return to Earth following the arrival of Crew-10 to the orbital laboratory.
The return mission will be conducted with SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which is expected to arrive at the company’s processing facility in Florida in early January 2025. Once prepared, it will head to the ISS to bring back the stranded astronauts.
Meanwhile, four NASA astronauts – Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi, and Kirill Peskov – are continuing their training for the Crew-10 mission at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.