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The space agency announced Tuesday that SpaceX will switch
capsules for upcoming astronaut flights in order to bring Butch
Wilmore and Suni Williams home in mid-March instead of late
March or April. That will shave at least a couple weeks off
their prolonged stay at the International Space Station, which
hit the eight-month mark last week.
“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges,” NASA’s
commercial crew program manager Steve Stich said in a statement.
The test pilots should have returned in June on Boeing’s
Starliner capsule after what should have been a weeklong flight
demo. But the capsule had so much trouble getting to the space
station that NASA decided to bring it back empty and reassigned
the pair to SpaceX.
Then SpaceX delayed the launch of their replacements on a brand
new capsule that needed more prepping, which added more time to
Wilmore and Williams’ mission.
With even more work still anticipated for the new capsule, NASA
opted for its next crew to fly up on an older capsule, with
liftoff now targeted for March 12. This older capsule had
already been assigned to a private crew awaiting launch this
spring.
The private flight arranged by the Houston company Axiom Space,
featuring astronauts from Poland, Hungary and India, was bumped
and will launch later to the space station, possibly still this
spring.
NASA prefers having a new crew arrive before sending the old one
back, in this case Wilmore, Williams and two others up there
since September. The new crew going up includes two NASA
astronauts, as well as one from Japan and one from Russia.
NASA’s latest change in plans comes two weeks after the space
agency said it was working “expeditiously” to bring back Wilmore
and Williams as soon as possible. Just a day earlier, President
Donald Trump and SpaceX’s Elon Musk had vowed to accelerate the
astronauts’ return.
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