They’re all together now. The three astronauts and one cosmonaut of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission docked with the International Space Station just after midnight ET Sunday, and at 1:35 a.m., opened the hatches between their Space Dragon spacecraft and the ISS, meeting up with the crew already there.
NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov were welcomed by the Expedition 72 crew, including NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Don Petitt, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner.
Liftoff went smoothly at 7:03 p.m. ET on Friday when a Falcon 9 rocket lifted the Dragon spacecraft Endurance into space.
Read more: NASA’s ‘Stranded’ Astronauts Days Away From Coming Home
Watch this: Watch NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 Dock With the International Space Station
Return of ‘stranded’ astronauts
Crew-10 has a bit more riding on it than a typical crew rotation mission. Williams and Wilmore became long-term ISS residents after riding to the station on a test mission for Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule. The crew capsule encountered technical issues and was sent back to Earth without the astronauts.
Williams and Wilmore’s ISS stay unexpectedly stretched out for more than eight months. Crew-10’s arrival means Willams, Wilmore, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will be able to hand off ISS duties to the newcomers and return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon sent up in September. That Dragon arrived with two open seats for the Starliner crew’s journey home.
With the launch and docking successful, the Crew-9 members, including the much-delayed Williams and Wilmore, will depart the space station no earlier than Wednesday, March 19, depending on the weather at the splashdown locations off the coast of Florida.
Both Williams and Wilmore have insisted they don’t feel stranded, though that term has been widely applied to them in news stories and social media.
Watch this: NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 Launch: Mission to Return Stranded Astronauts Begins
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