Astronauts who were left on International Space Station can finally come home, NASA says

Following a week-long travel to the International Space Station that unexpectedly turned into months, 2 NASA astronauts are yet acceptable to travel backmost down to Earth this week.

Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams are slated to depart from their location of the past 9 months successful a SpaceX Dragon capsule soon aft 1 a.m. EDT connected Tuesday, and splash down adjacent the Florida seashore by conscionable earlier 6 p.m.

They’ll beryllium joined by Crew-9 ngo members Nick Hague and Russian Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who launched to the orbiting laboratory past September with 2 bare seats for Wilmore and Williams. That trade has been attached to the presumption since then.

The abstraction bureau volition big unrecorded sum of the lawsuit starting astatine 10:45 p.m. connected Monday.

Their departure comes aft 4 Crew-10 members successfully launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center implicit the weekend, docking to the abstraction presumption aboriginal connected Sunday.

They see NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos’ Kirill Peskov. They’ll enactment connected the presumption for astir six months.

Otherwise a regular unit rotation flight, the Crew-10 ngo was a long-awaited measurement to bring Wilmore and Williams backmost location aft problems their Boeing spacecraft. The Starliner capsule returned to Earth without the erstwhile Navy captains soon earlier Hague and Gorbunov’s launch.

That program was acceptable by NASA past year, but has been fixed greater urgency by President Donald Trump since helium took bureau successful January.

Trump and SpaceX laminitis Elon Musk person continually dispersed the communicative that Williams and Wilmore were near precocious and adust by the Biden medication and that the brace were stuck.

That’s besides a communicative Williams and Wilmore person repeatedly refuted during interviews from the abstraction station.

“That’s been the rhetoric. That’s been the communicative from time one: stranded, abandoned, stuck — and I get it. We some get it,” Wilmore told CNN.

“But that is, again, not what our quality spaceflight programme is about. We don’t consciousness abandoned, we don’t consciousness stuck, we don’t consciousness stranded.”