A long-awaited mission to return stranded US astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station has been launched by Nasa and SpaceX.
The pair were due to spend eight days on the ISS in June, but technical problems with the experimental spacecraft that took them there have left them stuck on the orbital laboratory for nine months.
On Friday night, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four astronauts who will replace Williams and Wilmore. The new crew were scheduled to arrive early on Sunday at about 3.30am GMT, and Williams and Wilmore – along with Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov – are expected to return to Earth on Wednesday.
The mission became entangled in controversy after President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk, who is also SpaceX’s CEO, claimed without evidence that former president Joe Biden had abandoned Williams and Wilmore on the station for political reasons. The two astronauts rejected this accusation.
They arrived at the ISS in June 2024 on a Starliner spacecraft built by Boeing, an aerospace rival to SpaceX. Nasa planned to return the two astronauts to Earth on the craft until problems were found with some of its thrusters, which would have played a crucial role in slowing down the spacecraft before re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
Leaks of helium from the craft’s propulsion system were also discovered, and Nasa chose not to risk using Starliner to take Williams and Wilmore back to Earth. Instead, the empty spaceship was undocked from the ISS and flown backfor an automated, parachute-assisted landing in the New Mexico desert while the two astronauts were kept aboard the ISS to await a flight home on a scheduled crew rotation mission, even though this meant keeping them in orbit for months.
Williams this month told reporters that she was looking forward to returning home to her family and two dogs. “It’s been a rollercoaster for them, probably a little bit more than for us,” she said.
