A SpaceX Dragon capsule safely carried four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on a NASA crew-swap mission, clearing the way for two NASA astronauts who have spent nine months on the station to return.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for the Crew-10 mission docked with the ISS at 12:04 AM ET (04:04 GMT) on Sunday, about 29 hours after launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The new crew was welcomed upon arrival by the ISS’s seven-person team, including veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, both retired Navy test pilots, who have been stationed there since June.
Wilmore and Williams were unable to fly back to Earth because they ran into propulsion problems on the first crewed flight of the Boeing Starliner spacecraft, making it unsuitable for their return. Their longer duration was more than the normal ISS rotation of approximately six months, though much less than the US spaceflight record of 371 days made by astronaut Frank Rubio in 2023, or the global record of 437 consecutive days established by Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on the Mir space station.
Although the Crew-10 mission is a routine crew rotation flight, it comes as an important milestone toward the much-awaited return of Wilmore and Williams. The mission has gained momentum as President Donald Trump underscored NASA’s plans after taking office in January.
Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to leave the ISS on Wednesday at about 4 AM ET (08:00 GMT) aboard along with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian astronaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Hague and Gorbunov came to the ISS in September aboard a Crew Dragon vehicle, which had two seats available for Wilmore and Williams. That spacecraft has been docked to the station ever since.
The Crew-10 crew members, who will remain on the ISS for approximately six months, are NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Russian astronaut Kirill Peskov.
