NASA has announced yet another delay in the return of two astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station (ISS), extending their stay until at least late March 2025. Veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who arrived at the ISS in June, will now spend over nine months in space instead of the originally planned eight days.
Wilmore and Williams traveled to the ISS aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, but issues with the spacecraft’s propulsion system led NASA to revise their mission. After weeks of testing the Starliner, NASA decided to return it to Earth without its crew and arrange for Wilmore and Williams to return with the astronauts from SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.
Crew-9, which arrived at the ISS in late September with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams, had originally planned to return to Earth in February 2025. However, NASA announced that Crew-10, the mission set to relieve Crew-9 and bring the stranded astronauts home, will now launch no earlier than March 2025. Both crews will remain aboard the ISS during a “handover period.”
The delay is to allow NASA and SpaceX to complete processing of a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission. As a result, Wilmore and Williams will remain in space far longer than initially anticipated. SpaceX has been conducting regular ISS crew rotations every six months.
