An image of the SpaceX rocket looking over the Rio Grande in Brownsville, Texas, United States, July 22, 2024.
Veronica Cardenas | Reuters
SpaceX Launch a rescue mission for two astronauts stranded at the International Space Station on Saturday, sending a compact crew to bring them home but not until next year.
The capsule launched into orbit to pick up the test pilots there The Boeing spacecraft returns to Earth empty earlier this month because of safety concerns. The switch in trips caused NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Alexander Gorbunov to take it back Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Because NASA rotates crews on the space station about every six months, this newly launched flight with two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams won’t return until late February. Officials said there was no way to get them back sooner on SpaceX without disrupting other scheduled missions.
By the time they returned, the pair had been in space for more than eight months. They are expected to be gone just a week when they sign up for Boeing’s first astronaut flight, which launches in June.
Ultimately, NASA decided that Boeing’s Starliner was too risky after a series of thruster failures and helium leaks derailed its trip to the orbiting complex. The space agency removed two astronauts from this SpaceX launch to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return trip.
Williams has since been promoted to commander of the space station, which will soon return to its normal population of seven people. After Hague and Gorbunov arrive this weekend, the four astronauts living there since March can leave on their own SpaceX capsule. Their return home was delayed a month due to Starliner turmoil.
Hague noted before the flight that change is a constant in human spaceflight.
“There’s always something changing. Maybe this time the public sees it a little more clearly,” he said.
Hague was assigned to command the rescue mission based on his experience and emergency handling of the launch six years ago. The Russian rocket failed shortly after takeoff, and the capsule carrying him and a cosmonaut was launched from the top to safety.
NASA’s rookie astronaut Zena Cardman and veteran space pilot Stephanie Wilson were pulled from this flight after NASA chose to go with SpaceX to bring the stranded astronauts home. The space agency said both will be qualified to fly on future missions. Gorbunov remains subject to the exchange agreement between NASA and the Russian Space Agency.
“I don’t know exactly when I will launch into space, but I know that I will get there,” Cardman said from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where she participated in a livestream of the launch.
Hague acknowledged the challenges of launching with half a crew and returning with two astronauts trained on another spacecraft.
“We have a dynamic challenge ahead,” Hague said after arriving in Houston last weekend. “We know each other and we are professionals, we step up and do what is asked of us.”
SpaceX has long been a leader in NASA’s commercial crew program, which was established when the space shuttles were retired more than a decade ago. SpaceX beat Boeing to sending astronauts to the space station in 2020 and now has up to 10 crewed flights for NASA.
Boeing has struggled with problems for years, repeating a Starliner test flight without anyone on board after the first flight went off course. The Starliner that carried Wilmore and Williams into space landed without problems in the New Mexico desert on September 6 and has since returned to the Kennedy Space Center. A week ago, Boeing’s defense and space chief was replaced.
Delayed because Hurricane Helene was making landfall in Florida, SpaceX’s latest liftoff marked the first launch for astronauts from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX took over the old Titan rocket launcher nearly two decades ago and used it to launch satellites, while crews flew from Kennedy’s former Apollo and space shuttle launch pad next door. The company wants more flexibility as more Falcon rockets fly.
