2024-08-25 03:06:31
This flight will be much longer than planned: two astronauts will have to stay on the International Space Station until next year due to problems with their rocket.
The US space agency NASA plans to bring two astronauts, who have been on board the International Space Station (ISS) for much longer than originally planned due to problems with the “Starliner”, back to Earth next February on a different spacecraft, the “Crew Dragon” from SpaceX. NASA announced this at a press conference on Saturday.
This decision was made for safety reasons, said NASA boss Bill Nelson. According to this plan, NASA astronaut Suni Williams and her colleague Barry Wilmore will return with the “Crew Dragon” from Elon Musk’s company SpaceX in February 2025.
The launch of “Crew 9” with the “Crew Dragon”, currently planned for September, would then only be carried out with two astronauts instead of four. Williams and Wilmore are to become part of this crew and return to Earth with their two colleagues in 2025. This means that the crisis-ridden “Starliner” will fly back to Earth without a crew.
Williams and Wilmore arrived at the ISS at the beginning of June with the first manned test flight of the “Starliner”. The mission was actually only planned for about a week, but then numerous technical problems arose with the “Starliner” – including with the engines and helium leaks.
NASA then spent a long time considering whether it would be better to bring the two astronauts back to Earth with the “Starliner” or rather – months later – with the “Crew Dragon”.
The “Starliner” from the US aerospace company Boeing is a partially reusable spacecraft that consists of a three-meter-high capsule for the crew and a service module. Unlike SpaceX’s “Crew Dragon”, it does not land on water, but on Earth.
The spacecraft set off on its first manned test flight from the Cape Canaveral spaceport in the US state of Florida at the beginning of June after years of delays. In May 2022, the “Starliner” completed its first successful unmanned flight to the ISS and spent four days there. In the future, it will transport astronauts to the ISS as an alternative to the “Crew Dragon” space capsule.