SpaceX launches mission to help NASA astronauts stranded in space

NASA’s beleaguered mission to rescue two stranded astronauts has finally launched, setting the stage for a happy ending to the nine-month-long saga.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Friday night. It is on a mission to transport four new astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

The new team is expected to reach the station late on Saturday. Once there, astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore will be able to return to Earth around March 19.

Williams and Wilmore have been in space since June 5. Some, including SpaceX owner Elon Musk, believe they were kept on the ISS for political motives.

The duo were initially scheduled for an eight day mission. 

Musk said he offered to bring the astronauts home eight months ago, but the Biden Administration shot it down because it would’ve made Donald Trump ‘look good’ in the presidential race against former vice president Kamala Harris. 

The successful takeoff comes after the Crew-10 mission was scrubbed on the launch pad due to mechanical issues just minutes before launch on Wednesday.

Crew-10 includes NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi, and Russia’s Kirill Peskov.

‘Spaceflight is tough, but humans are tougher,’ McClain said minutes into the flight. 

The new crew will spend the next six months at the space station, considered the normal stint. 

Alongside Williams and Wilmore, NASA’s Nick Hague and Russia’s Aleksandr Gorbunov will be returning home on board SpaceX’s Crew-9 Dragon capsule that is already docked at the ISS.

Last year’s presidential race seems to be at the heart of why the astronauts have been stuck in space so long. 

Musk backed Trump during the 2024 presidential race, donating $288 million to his campaign and appearing at several MAGA rallies

During a recent press briefing, Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of the NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate, admitted that there ‘may have been conversations’ in the Biden White House about delaying the return for political optics of having Trump’s most famous donor save the day, but he was not part of the discussions.

Wednesday’s Crew-10 launch was called off due to a hydraulic system issue with the Falcon 9 rocket. NASA said teams were working to address the problem.

NASA had moved up the return mission by two weeks after after President Trump told Musk to ‘go get’ Williams and Wilmore. 

Before the president’s request, the astronauts were not coming back earlier than March 26. 

‘It’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,’ Williams said of her family. 

‘We’re here, we have a mission – we’re just doing what we do every day, and every day is interesting because we’re up in space and it’s a lot of fun.’ 

When the new crew arrives aboard the station, Wilmore, Williams, Nick Hague, and Aleksandr Gorbunov can return to Earth in the capsule that has been attached to the station since September.

Wilmore and Williams flew to the ISS as the first test crew of Boeing’s Starliner, which suffered propulsion system issues in space.

NASA deemed it too risky for the astronauts to fly home on the Boeing craft. This led to the current plan to bring them home in a SpaceX capsule that arrived in September.

The space agency gave Boeing $4.5 billion contract to develop Starliner in a bid to compete with Musk’s SpaceX.

Bowersox said that SpaceX ‘helped with a lot of options’ for bringing Williams and Wilmore back earlier, but the final decision came down to costs.

He explained that they discussed adding a mission or bringing the currently docked capsule home early, ‘but we ruled them out pretty quickly just based on how much money we’ve got in our budget.’ 

NASA’s budget for the fiscal year 2024 comes in at just under $30 billion.

It comes after a report found the agency spent millions on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) grants and contracts while Williams and Wilmore have been stuck in space.

Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president for SpaceX, also said that NASA’s delayed plan allowed the agency ‘to use Sunny and Butch in a very productive manner’ and ‘keep the science going.’

Returning the astronauts early would’ve meant fewer bodies on the International Space Station (ISS) to continue research.