SpaceX and NASA have launched a mission to bring back US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station (ISS), where they have been stranded for nine months.
The lift-off took place last night with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft on the Crew-10 mission.
The mission also launched four crew members to the ISS: NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos wcosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the International Space Station.
Crew-10 is the 10th crew rotation mission under SpaceX’s human space transportation system and the 11th flight with a crew aboard to the ISS station through NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, including the Demo-2 test flight.
Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stranded on the ISS for nine months after reaching there in June last year.
They were supposed to stay there for about a week. As test pilots for ’Boeings new Starliner capsule.
Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week or so when they launched from Cape Canaveral on June 5. A series of helium leaks and thruster failures marred their trip to the space station, setting off months of investigation by NASA and Boeing on how best to proceed.
Ahead of the launch, US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth shared a video message expressing support for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10
