Two days late, a sparing space station crew took place on a flight on Friday that puts the stage for Starliner Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams astronauts to finish home after almost 300 days in space.
The crew commander Anne McClain, the pilot Nichole Ayers, the Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and the Russian Cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, were hooked on their Drac capsule of the crew in Kennedy Space Center and took off on a Spacex Falcon 9 rocket 9 at 19:03 EDT.
NASA
A Attempted Launch Wednesday It was called 45 minutes before the uprising due to problems that verify the behavior of the hydraulically fed clamp arms that hold the top of the rocket to the launch pad support tower. The tower rests on the rocket on the lifting and the arms of the clamp must be removed completely.
Spacex purged hydraulic lines to erase the system for launch, but, given the time needed to solve and solve the problem, along with the high winds planned Thursday, NASA and Spacex went to the second crew test on Friday.
Given a timely elevator, the crew dragon will perform an autonomous performance with the space station, which will be updated with the laboratory on Saturday night and will move to the port of the space station at 11:30 pm
NASA
Commander Nick Hare, Cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams, Cosmonauts, Cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams, who were launched aboard a space Soyuz, Ivan Vagner and the NASA astronaut, who were launched on board a spacecraft.
Haia and Gorbunov launched on board the crew dragon September. Two NASA astronauts originally planned to be on this flight took place on the mission to release two seats for Wilmore and Williams. They were part of the Creech 9 and worked with Hane and Gorbunov during their six -month mission.
The ravines of the crew 9 are planning to spend two days familiarizing their replacements with the complexities of the space station operation before climbing to their own crew dragon, the same as he had and Gorbunov at the station last September, for the trip home.
The flight plan asks to split Tuesday, setting the stage for the Resturada and Splashdown on the Gulf of Florida coast next weekend. At this time, Wilmore and Williams It will have registered about 290 days – 9.7 months – in a space in a flight initially planned that will last a little more than a week. The time of Hague and Gorbunov in space will reach around 174 days, depending on the landing date.
“This is a huge mission for us to the crew 10,” said Steve Stich, manager of the commercial crew program that supervises Spacex Crew Dragons and Starliner de Boeing. “They are all big, but this started until the Creeping 9 when we launched this mission with two empty seats, and we had these reserved seats in Butch and Suni.”
NASA
Starliner’s astronauts have “just done a phenomenal work,” said Stich, “and so we are excited to return them.”
Wilmore and Williams were tossed on board a Boeing Starliner capsule on June 5 For the first piloting test flight of the spacecraft. The next day they were successfully docked with the International Space Station, but the Starliner experienced multiple leaks from the Heli propulsion system and several maneuvering planes did not produce the expected push.
The astronauts originally planned to spend about eight days in space, but NASA and Boeing, the Starliner builder, performed weeks of tests and analysis to determine if Starliner could be trusted to return to the crew on Earth.
In August, Boeing managers were convinced that engineers understood problems and crew could safely return home to the starliner. But NASA managers ruled out this option. Instead, they decided to keep astronauts on board the station until Early this year When they could hit a trip on board the Dragon of Crew 9.
In the meantime, The Starliner successfully returned to Earth in September, giving a helping hand to solve problems and ongoing work to prepare for the eventual resumption of flights.
Starliner astronauts took the news of their mission extension to Stride.
“Butch, and I knew it was a test flight, we knew we would probably find some things (they didn’t work as expected), and we found some things,” Williams told CBS News An interview during flight. “And this was not a surprise. The discussion happened in the summer, and as things began to develop -to reveal, we understood that, well, we could be a little more.
“And this is what our job is. We both have been in the army, both boys in the Navy, our deployments have been expanded. Do what is suitable for the team and what was suitable for the team is to stay here and be members of the crew of the expedition for the International Space Station.”
NASA
President Trump blamed the missed mission to the administration of Bidenwho said he had “abandoned” the Starliner crew.
“Biden left them there,” Trump told the Oval Office journalists on March 6. “We have two astronauts stuck in the space. I asked Elon (Musk), I said,” Do a favor, you can go out? “He said” yes. “
But the crew dragon referred to by Mr. Trump will not bring Wilmore and Williams again to Earth. 10 flyers are assigned to the crew and will be docked at the exit of the next five months. His arrival, however, erases the path to Crew 9, including Wilmore and Williams, to finally return to Earth with Haia and Gorbunov.
Musk said before launching a mission to return to Wilmore and Williams again on Earth, but the offer, he said, was rejected for political reasons. NASA executives say they have never heard of an offer and that the current plan causes the minor interruption of stations operations and rotation flights of the downstream crew.
Although NASA could have demolished the crew 9 before aboard the Dragon of the Creeping 9, but this would have left a single astronaut – Pettit – on board the laboratory to operate and maintain the United States segment of the space station. The investigations stopped and had difficulty in various emergency scenarios.
“Sure, we could have taken us home, but this leaves only three people at the Soyuz crew space station, two Russians and a North -American,” Williams told CBS News. “And you know, the space station is big. It’s a building, you know, it’s the size of a football field. Things happen.
“So things can go wrong and you can fix it, both inside and out. Therefore, it is important to have additional people to be able to do it.”
Both Willmore and Williams have repeatedly said that they are not “stuck” and that they have not been “abandoned” in space.
“This has been the narrative from day one, stuck, abandoned, hooked, and I succeed, we both do,” a journalist told Wilmore during a recent interview. “But again, this is not what our human space flight program is treated. We do not feel abandoned, we do not feel stuck, we do not feel stuck.
“We prepare. We are committed. This is what your human space flight program is. It is prepared for all the contingencies that we can conceive, and we prepare for those … We change (the narrative) to” prepared “and” committed “.”