NASA’s stuck astronauts welcome replacements to International Space Station

Two astronauts who have been marooned at the International Space Station (ISS) for almost 10 months are finally set to return to Earth this week

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams had expected to stay in orbit for just eight days after joining the ISS last June.

But technical issues with their Boeing Starliner spacecraft meant they have been stuck on board the laboratory ever since.

Now, after months of planning, a SpaceX capsule has docked at the ISS – setting the stage for their repatriation.

The Dragon craft docked with the laboratory at 4.04am UK time, around 29 hours after it had been launched on the top of the Falcon 9 rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It delivered four new astronauts who will spend the next few days learning the ropes from Wilmore and Williams.

Wilmore and Williams hope to return to Earth this week on another SpaceX capsule. Weather permitting, their capsule – which has been at the ISS since September – will splash down off Florida’s coast on Wednesday.

The latest newcomers – NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, both military pilots, along with Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov, both former airline pilots, known as “Crew 10” – will spend the next six months at the space station.

Crew 10 will undergo months of research to “prepare for human exploration beyond low-Earth orbit and to benefit humanity on Earth”, SpaceX said.

It took almost two hours for the latest Dragon to safely dock at the ISS, in what is an automated process.

After the hatches opened, Crew-10 joined NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Don Petitt, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner.

Mr Wilmore swung open the space station’s hatch and rang the ship’s bell as the arrivals floated in one by one and were greeted with hugs and handshakes.

“It was a wonderful day. Great to see our friends arrive,” Williams told Mission Control.

Main image: The four SpaceX Crew-10 members and the seven Expedition 72 crew members join each other for a welcoming ceremony shortly after the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft docked to the International Space Station and the hatches opened. (Credit: NASA)