SpaceX Delays Mission To Bring Sunita Williams, Other Stuck Astronauts Home
NASA and SpaceX said the launch was stood down because of an issue with the ground equipment used to support the flight.
SpaceX delayed the launch of a new crew to the International Space Station on Wednesday in a mission that would pave the way for marooned astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to finally return home.
NASA and SpaceX said the launch was stood down because of an issue with the ground equipment used to support the flight. The delay came less than an hour before the scheduled launch time, with the crew already seated in the capsule. The next launch window is from 7:26 p.m. Eastern Daylight time on March 13, the companies said.
The mission crew includes two NASA astronauts, Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, as well as Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.
NASA maintains a continuous, rotating presence on the ISS to help manage the station’s operations and research. That means the so-called Crew-10 astronauts must arrive at the station and go through a roughly two-day handover period before the current crew, which includes Wilmore and Williams, can depart. Then, Williams and Wilmore are slated to board a capsule already docked at the station and head back to Earth with other crew members.
If the mission can launch Thursday, the pair will leave the space station no earlier than March 17.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS last June on a Boeing Co. Starliner spacecraft and were initially slated to stay for about a week. But after Starliner suffered technical difficulties on the journey there, NASA declared that it was too risky to bring the astronauts home on the craft.
Instead, the space agency stated that the astronauts would ride back to Earth on a SpaceX craft, extending Wilmore and Williams’ stay for about nine months.
