After a disappointing scrub of the launch, a replacement crew for the space station was cleared to blast off on Friday. This flight will allow Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore (left) and Sunita William (right) to return home after almost 300 days in space.
The crew of Crew 10 hoped for a better outcome the second time. Anne McClain as commander, Nichole Ayers as pilot, Takuya onishi, a Japanese astronaut, and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov were all scheduled to board their Crew Dragon capsule at 7:03 pm EST and launch atop SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The launch attempt on Wednesday had to be called off 45 mins before liftoff due to problems with the hydraulically powered clamp arm that holds the top of rocket’s support tower. The rocket leans away from the tower at liftoff, and the clamp arms need to be fully retracted.
SpaceX cleared the hydraulic lines for launch. However, NASA and SpaceX chose Friday as the second attempt to launch the crew due to the high winds forecast for Thursday and the time it would take to resolve the problem.
If the Crew Dragon is launched on time, it will perform an autonomous rendezvous at the Space Station. It will catch up with the Lab Saturday night, and then dock at the forward port of the station at 11:15 p.m.
Crew 9 Commander Nick Hague will welcome them aboard, as well as cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and NASA astronaut Don Pettit. They were launched in September last year aboard a Russian Soyuz.
Hague and Gorbunov launched on the Crew 9 Dragon during September. Wilmore and Williams were able to take two seats that had been originally reserved for two NASA astronauts. They were assigned to Crew 9 where they worked with Hague, Gorbunov and their team for the six-month duration of their mission.
Crew 9 will spend two days familiarizing replacements with space station operations before they board their Crew Dragon for the return flight. This is the same Dragon that Hague and Gorbunov flew to the station in September last year.
By that time, span class=”link”>a data-invalid-url-rewrittenhttp=”” href=”https://www.cbsnews.com/news/starliner… butch wilmore politics update/” target=”_blank=”>Wilmore/a> and.. By then, Wilmore will have spent about 290 days (9.7 months) in space. This flight was originally scheduled to last just a few more than a week. Hague and Gorbunov will spend 174 days in space, depending on when they land.
Steve Stich, the manager of SpaceX Crew Dragons’ and Boeing Starliner’s commercial crew program said: “This is an important mission for Crew 10.” “They are all huge, but this began with Crew 9 when two seats were left empty and reserved for Butch & Suni.”
Stich stated that the Starliner astronauts had “just done an incredible job” and “we’re excited to have them back.”
Wilmore and Williams were launched on a Boeing Starliner capsule for the first piloted spacecraft test flight. The next day they docked successfully with the International Space Station, but Starliner suffered multiple helium leaks in the propulsion system and the maneuvering jets failed to produce the thrust expected.
NASA and Boeing, Starliner’s manufacturer, conducted weeks of testing and analysis to determine if the Starliner was capable of safely bringing its crew to Earth.
Boeing managers believed that by August the engineers had figured out the problem and that the crew would be able to safely return home on the Starliner. NASA managers rejected that option. They decided to keep astronauts on the station until , early in this year.
Starliner returned successfully to Earth in September. This was followed by a hands-on troubleshooting process and ongoing preparations for a possible resumption.
The Starliner astronauts accepted the news that their mission would be extended with ease.
Williams said in an in-flight interview, “Butch and I knew that this was a trial flight. We knew we would likely find some things (that didn’t work as expected).” It was not surprising. As the discussion progressed over the summer and things began to unravel, we understood that we may be staying up here for a while longer.
“And that is what we do.” Both of us have served in the Navy and our deployments were extended. “You do what is right for your team. And what was right for our team was to stay here and be Expedition Crew Members for the International Space Station.”
President Trump attributed the mission extension to the Biden administration . He said that the Biden government had “abandoned’ the Starliner Crew.
Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office of March 6, said: “Biden has left them there.” “We have two astronauts who are stuck in outer space. I asked Elon Musk, I said: “Do me a favour, can you get them out?” He replied ‘Yes’. He is getting ready to go, I believe in two weeks.”
The Crew Dragon, to which Mr. Trump referred, will not bring Wilmore and Williams home. It is assigned to Crew 10 fliers, and will stay docked at outpost for five months. The arrival of Crew 9 fliers, including Wilmore, Williams and Hague, will allow them to return to Earth with Hague, Gorbunov and the rest of Crew 9.
Musk claimed that he had offered earlier to launch a space mission to return Wilmore and Williams to Earth sooner, but his offer was rejected for political reasons. NASA managers claim they have never heard of this offer, and that their current plan is the most efficient for station operations and crew rotation flights.
NASA could have sent Crew 9 back to Earth earlier on the Crew 9 Dragon. However, this would have only left one astronaut – Pettit – in the lab. He would have been responsible for operating and maintaining the U.S. portion of the station. The research would have ceased and he’d have been unable to handle a number of emergencies.
Williams, speaking to CBS News, said, “Sure, we could have gone home but there are only three of us left on the station, two Russians, and one American.” “And you know, it’s a big space station. It’s an enormous building. Things happen.
“Things can go wrong and you have to be able fix them, both inside and out.” It is important to have additional staff to help with this.
Wilmore and Williams both have said that they haven’t been “stranded”, and haven’t been “abandoned”, in space.
Wilmore said to a reporter in a recent interview: “That has been the story from day one. Stuck, abandoned, stranded. I understand it. We both do.” “But, that’s not the point of our human spaceflight program,” Wilmore said in a recent interview. We don’t feel abandoned, we don’t feel stuck, we don’t feel stranded.
We come prepared. We come committed. Your human space flight program is that. It is prepared for all contingencies we can imagine, and we are ready for them.
