Houston: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Elon Musk’s SpaceX on Friday launched a much-awaited Crew-10 Mission to bring back US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station (ISS), where they have been stranded for nine months. Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft on the Crew-10 mission lifted off at 7:03 ET on Friday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Four astronauts boarded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to replace Williams and Wilmore at the ISS.. These four astronauts are - NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA ) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.
Visuals Of The Launch:
Notably, Crew-10 is the 10th crew rotation mission under SpaceX's human space transportation system and the 11th flight with a crew aboard to the ISS station, including the Demo-2 test flight. The mission is part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
Astronauts Inside Dragon Spacecraft:
On March 12, the launch of the Crew-10 Mission was due to a "hydraulic system issue with a ground support clamp arm for the Falcon 9 rocket.
Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams have been stranded on the ISS for nine months after reaching there in June last year. They were supposed to stay there for about a week.
The astronauts were transported from Earth to the ISS aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft However, the spacecraft came back to Earth unmanned in September. As per a Fox News report, Starliner had faced "helium leaks" and "issues with the spacecraft reaction control thrusters" while docking with the ISS. The starnded scientists are likely to begin their journey towards the earth on March 19.
