WASHINGTON — NASA and SpaceX have agreed to switch Crew Dragon capsules to avoid further delays in the launch of a new crew to the International Space Station.
NASA announced Feb. 11 that it would use the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance for the upcoming Crew-10 mission to the ISS rather than a new Crew Dragon spacecraft as originally planned. Endurance, previously used for the Crew-3, -5 and -7 missions, had been slated to fly the Ax-4 private astronaut mission to the ISS for Axiom Space.
Delays in completing the new Crew Dragon spacecraft led NASA to make the switch. “Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges,” Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said in a statement. “We greatly benefit from SpaceX’s commercial efforts and their proactive approach in having another spacecraft ready for us to assess and use in support of Crew-10.”
NASA said in the statement that the change in spacecraft means they are “accelerating” the launch of the mission and the subsequent return of the Crew-9 Crew Dragon spacecraft currently on the ISS. Launch of Crew-10 is currently scheduled for no earlier than March 12, rather than late March as previously planned. Crew-9 would return several days after the arrival of Crew-10.
However, NASA originally planned to launch Crew-10 in February. NASA announced Dec. 17 it was delaying the launch from February to late March because of delays in final assembly and testing of the new Crew Dragon spacecraft. Even with this new swap of spacecraft, Crew-10 will still launch later than intended.
Crew-9 will return NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos Aleksandr Gorbunov, who launched on the Crew Dragon in September, along with NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who arrived on the station in June on the CST-100 Starliner Crew Flight Test mission. Williams and Wilmore remained on the station when Starliner departed in September after NASA concluded issues with that spacecraft’s thrusters posed too great of a safety risk. NASA instead launched Crew-9 with two, rather than four, people on board to free up seats for Wilmore and Williams.
Their extended stay became a political issue when Musk posted on X, the social media site he owns, Jan. 28 that President Trump had instructed him to return Williams and Wilmore “as soon as possible,” adding that it was “terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.”
Trump confirmed that on his own social media site, Truth Social, stating that the astronauts had been “virtually abandoned in space” by the Biden administration and that “Elon will soon be on his way.”
The announcements appeared to take NASA off guard, and the agency did not offer a formal response until the next day. “NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions,” it stated, effectively confirming existing plans.
Williams, in an interview with CBS News aired Feb. 7, disputed the claim that she felt “virtually abandoned” on the station. “I don’t think I’m abandoned. I don’t think we’re stuck up here,” she said. “We’ve got food. We’ve got clothes. We have a ride home in case anything really bad does happen to the International Space Station.”
The swap in capsules does not affect crew assignments. Crew-10 will be commanded by NASA astronaut Anne McClain with fellow NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers as pilot. JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov will be mission specialists.
It’s unclear what the swap will mean for the schedule for Ax-4, which will now use the new Crew Dragon originally intended for Crew-10. That mission was scheduled to launch as soon as April for an approximately two-week stay at the ISS. The Ax-4 mission, commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, will include Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, Polish astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski and Hungarian astronaut Tibor Kapu.
