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A capsule made by Elon Musk’s SpaceX docked at the International Space Station early on Sunday, delivering a new crew to enable US astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to return to Earth following a nine-month mission that was supposed to last eight days.
The Dragon capsule docked at 12.04am ET, about 29 hours after launching from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying four new crew members from the US, Japan and Russia.
After the astronauts entered the ISS, Williams told Mission Control it was “great to see our friends arrive”.
Williams and Wilmore, along with Nasa astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, are expected to head home on Wednesday after a handover period. Until their return, there will be 11 crew on the space station.
According to Nasa, Williams and the three other crew members had conducted 900 hours of research and more than 150 scientific experiments during their mission, including on garden watering and exercises to keep astronauts fit in space.
Calling her extended stay “a unique experience”, Williams has said she missed seeing weather changes and walking her dogs. “When I take them on a walk, sometimes it’s raining, sometimes it’s windy, sometimes it’s hot. But I am looking forward to feeling all that weather on Earth,” she said in a recent Nasa interview.
Hague and Gorbunov arrived at the ISS in September on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom craft, which will be used to bring Williams and Wilmore home.
The original plan was for the Boeing CST-100 Starliner that carried Williams and Wilmore to the ISS in June to bring them home after their short mission.
But Nasa decided in August that the Starliner could not be used because of thruster problems and helium leaks on the outward journey.
The decision was a humiliating setback for Boeing, raising questions about the company’s space ambitions at a time when its core commercial aircraft operation was already under intense regulatory pressure following last year’s mid-air blowout of a door panel on a 737 Max.
Starliner was meant to prove the company’s ability to operate in the new world of space procurement where the private sector, rather than Nasa, owns rockets and hardware and sells cargo and crew services to the US space agency.
But after serial problems and delays left it five years behind SpaceX, analysts say Starliner has become a symbol of what has gone wrong with Boeing’s space businesses.
Boeing has denied that the two US astronauts were “stranded” and has insisted that the delayed return was not a failure.
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