New setback for NASA astronauts: stuck until March?

New blow for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. On June 5, the two astronauts, aged 61 and 58, made the inaugural flight of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft which took them to the international space station, the ISS. The objective of this first manned flight was to see how the new spacecraft behaved. But everything didn’t go as planned. Moments before arriving at the ISS, the two astronauts noticed leaks in the spacecraft’s propulsion system and the shutdown of some of its thrusters.

Luckily, they managed to reach the space station without incident… But have been stuck there ever since! On August 7, NASA announced that it was refusing to allow Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return aboard the Starliner due to the risk deemed too great and preferring to transplant them aboard the SpaceX Crew-9 mission. In September, the capsule of this new mission took off with only two passengers on board, instead of four, and the promise of a return to dry land in February (eight months after the departure for “eight days” of the two astronauts).

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Suni Williams tried to keep her spirits up, saying: “We’re very busy here. It feels good to be in space and working with the ISS team. It’s like we’re at home. »

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Not before the end of March

However, NASA announced on Tuesday, December 17, the postponement from February to “the end of March at the earliest” of the launch of Crew-10 in order to give “the NASA and SpaceX teams time to complete the development of a new vessel space Dragon”. However, the American space agency is accustomed to its missions intersecting in space and not leaving the ISS empty of its inhabitants. The return of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to dry land will therefore not take place before spring. In the meantime, they are helping colleagues Don Pettit and Nick Hague with their work on gravity.