There were emotional scenes of smiling astronauts hugging and embracing in zero gravity on the International Space Station on Sunday after a replacement crew docked with the orbital outpost – a step towards the return home of two astronauts who have been stranded for more than nine months.
A SpaceX capsule delivered four astronauts to the ISS in a Nasa crew-swap mission that will allow the pair of stuck astronauts, Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Suni Williams, to return home after nine months on the orbiting lab.
Williams said it was a wonderful day and “great to see our friends arrive”, speaking shortly after her colleges emerged on to the orbital lab.
About 29 hours after launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, the Crew-10 astronauts’ SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule docked with the ISS at 4.04am GMT on Sunday.
In a live video, Nasa astronaut and team commander Anne McClain said: “Hi everybody down there on Earth. Crew-10 has had a great journey up here, about 28 hours to get back up to the space station. And I cannot tell you the immense joy of our crew when we looked out the window and saw the space station for the first time.”
She said: “You can hardly even put it into words … orbiting the Earth for the last couple of days, it has been absolutely incredible.”
McClain’s team were welcomed by the station’s seven-member crew, which includes Wilmore and Williams – veteran astronauts and retired Navy test pilots who have remained on the station after problems with Boeing’s Starliner capsule forced Nasa to bring it back empty.
Otherwise a routine crew rotation flight, the Crew-10 mission is a long-awaited first step to bring Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.
The pair are scheduled to depart the ISS on Wednesday as early as 8am, along with American Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Hague and Gorbunov flew to the ISS in September on a Crew Dragon craft with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams, and that craft has been attached to the station ever since.
The Crew-10 crew, scheduled to stay on the station for roughly six months, includes Americans McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russian Kirill Peskov.
The crew-swap mission became entangled in politics when the US president, Donald Trump, and his adviser Elon Musk, who is also SpaceX’s CEO, urged a quicker Crew-10 launch. They claimed, without evidence, that Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, had abandoned Wilmore and Williams on the station for political reasons. One Danish astronaut, Andreas “Andy” Mogensen, who has twice flown to the ISS gave the claim short shrift, saying “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.”
Wilmore and Williams have been doing scientific research and conducting routine maintenance with the other five astronauts. Williams told reporters this month that she was looking forward to returning home to see her two dogs and family. “It’s been a rollercoaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” she said.
Reuters contributed to this report
