Astronaut crew docks with space station to replace Butch and Suni

WASHINGTON – A SpaceX capsule delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) early on March 16 in a Nasa crew-swop mission that will allow a pair of stuck astronauts, Captain Butch Wilmore and Captain Suni Williams, to return home after nine months on the orbiting lab.

About 29 hours after launching at 7.03pm ET on March 15 from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the Crew-10 astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked to the ISS at 12.04am on March 16.

They were welcomed by the station’s seven-member crew, which includes Capt Wilmore and Capt Williams – veteran Nasa astronauts and retired Navy test pilots who have remained on the station after problems with Boeing’s Starliner capsule forced Nasa to bring it back empty.

Otherwise a routine crew rotation flight, the Crew-10 mission is a long-awaited first step to bring Capt Wilmore and Capt Williams back to Earth – part of a plan set by Nasa in 2024 that has been given greater urgency by President Donald Trump since he took office in January.

Capt Wilmore and Capt Williams are scheduled to depart the ISS on March 19 as early as 4am ET, along with Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

Colonel Hague and Lieutenant Gorbunov flew to the ISS in September on a Crew Dragon craft with two empty seats for Capt Wilmore and Capt Williams, and that craft has been attached to the station since.

The Crew-10 crew, scheduled to stay on the station for roughly six months, includes Nasa astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.

The crew-swop mission became entangled in politics as Mr Trump and his adviser, Mr Elon Musk, who is also SpaceX’s CEO, urged a quicker Crew-10 launch.

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