Delay in New SpaceX Crew Dragon Means Another Extension for Butch and Suni

The two NASA astronauts who are spending much longer aboard the International Space Station than planned are having their mission extended yet again. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived on Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test in June and now are part of Crew-9. They were supposed to come home in February after their replacements arrive on Crew-10, but Crew-10’s launch was just postponed because SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon spacecraft is not ready yet.

SpaceX has four reusable Crew Dragon capsules — Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance and Freedom — and is building a fifth. The first flight of the new capsule will take the next NASA-sponsored crew to the ISS early next year, Crew-10.  ISS crews rotate on roughly 6-month schedules.

Crew-10 was supposed to launch in February, but NASA announced today more time is needed to get the new capsule ready. According to NASA Commercial Crew program manager Steve Stich: “Fabrication, assembly, testing, and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking endeavor that requires great attention to detail.”  After  considering available options, including using one of the other Crew Dragons, NASA and SpaceX decided the best solution is to delay the handover from Crew-9 to Crew-10.

Crew-9 is an amalgam of Butch and Suni who could not return to Earth on Boeing’s Starliner because of concerns about its propulsion system, and NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov who are two of the original four members of Crew-9. The other two, NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, had to step aside from the flight so Butch and Suni could have their seats for the return trip.

Schedule changes are not uncommon for missions to the ISS, but the adjustments for Butch and Suni are capturing a lot of attention both because the problems with Starliner are on top of challenges Boeing is facing in its aircraft division and the fact they were only supposed to be on ISS for eight days and it turned into more than eight months.

Now it could be as many as 10 months. NASA didn’t announce a specific date for the Crew-10 launch, but said it would be in late March. NASA has an approximately five-day handover between crews so it likely will be early April before Crew-9 undocks to come home. Butch and Suni launched on June 5 and arrived on ISS the next day. If they were to return on April 5, it would be a 10-month mission.  That is not a record.  Several NASA astronauts have spent about a year on the ISS. Frank Rubio holds the U.S. record of 371 days.  Russian cosmonaut Valeriy Polyakhov holds the all-time spaceflight duration record of 438 days, set on Russia’s Mir space station in 1994-1995.

Stich said NASA appreciates “the flexibility of the station program and expedition crews as we work together to complete the new capsule’s readiness for flight.”

The ISS typically has seven people on board, four who come and go on a U.S. Crew Dragon and three on a Russian Soyuz. NASA and Roscosmos fly each other’s crew members to ensure that one person from each country is always aboard the ISS to operate the interdependent Russian and American segments.  In addition to Williams, Wilmore, Hague and Gorbunov, the current Expedition 72 crew includes Russia’s Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner (who will do a spacewalk on Thursday) and NASA’s Don Pettit, who arrived on Soyuz MS-26 in September.

The ISS is a partnership among the United States, Russia, Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries working through the European Space Agency. It has been permanently occupied by rotating international crews for more than 24 years. Spacecraft are always docked at the ISS to bring crews home, especially if there’s an emergency. Missions may be extended, but crews are not stranded.