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The 2 astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June welcomed their unique droop home with Sunday’s arrival of a SpaceX capsule.
SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return subsequent year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness as the 2 craft soared 265 miles (426 kilometers) above Botswana.
NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX following concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the primary Starliner take a look at flight with a crew, and NASA determined the thruster failures and helium leaks that cropped up after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to possibility the take a look at pilots’ return. So Starliner returned to Earth empty earlier this month.
The Dragon carrying NASA’s Reduce Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov will remain at the space station except February, turning what must have been a weeklong shuttle for Wilmore and Williams into a mission lasting more than eight months.
Two NASA astronauts were pulled from the mission to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.
NASA likes to replace its station crews every six months or so. SpaceX has offered the taxi carrier because the company’s first astronaut flight in 2020. NASA also hired Boeing for ferry flights after the space shuttles were retired, but flawed software and utterly different Starliner factors ended in years of delays and more than $1 billion in repairs.
Starliner inspections are underway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, with submit-flight opinions of data state to start this week.
“We’re a long way from saying, ‘Howdy, we’re writing off Boeing,’” NASA’s associate administrator Jim Free said at a pre-launch briefing.
The arrival of two original astronauts means the four who have been up there since March can now return to Earth in their very acquire SpaceX capsule in exactly over a week. Their stay was prolonged a month because of the Starliner turmoil.
Although Saturday’s liftoff went wisely, SpaceX said the rocket’s spent higher stage ended up outside its targeted impact zone within the Pacific because of a bad engine firing. The company has halted all Falcon launches except it figures out what went depraved.
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