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SpaceX Crew-10 Successfully Docks with the International Space Station, Paving Way for Stranded Astronauts’ Return After 9 Months

March 16, 2025

Screenshot: International Space Station / X

Early Sunday morning, the SpaceX Crew-10 mission successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), delivering four astronauts: NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA’s Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos’ Kirill Peskov.

This mission marks the 10th crew rotation facilitated by SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

According to the press release:

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, as the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the orbiting complex at 12:04 a.m. EDT, while the station was roughly 260 statute miles over the Atlantic Ocean.

Following Dragon’s link up to the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module, the crew members aboard Dragon and the space station will begin conducting standard leak checks and pressurization between the spacecraft and the station in preparation for hatch opening scheduled for approximately 1:45 a.m. on Sunday.

Crew-10 will join the Expedition 72 crew of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Don Petitt, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner. The number of crew aboard the space station will increase to 11 people before Crew-9 members Hague, Williams, Wilmore, and Gorbunov return to Earth following the crew handover period.

WATCH:

The arrival of Crew-10 enables the return of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been aboard the ISS since June 2024 due to technical issues with their original return vehicle.

After an eight-day mission on the maiden crewed voyage of Boeing’s Starliner became a 9-month stay in the International Space Station, the two American astronauts who have been stranded in space since June are now expected to return to Earth later this week using a different SpaceX capsule.

It can be recalled that NASA’s stranded astronauts have acknowledged that Joe Biden deliberately abandoned them in space for political purposes.

Barry Wilmore and his crewmate Sunita Williams have been stuck on the International Space Station since July last year after their Boeing Starliner ran into technical issues.

At a virtual press conference earlier this month, Wilmore was asked about Elon Musk’s claim that Joe Biden declined his offer to bring them back on a SpaceX flight several months ago for “political reasons.”

“I can only say that Mr Musk, what he says, is absolutely factual,” Wilmore said.

Wilmore went on to say he and his partner at the “utmost respect” for Musk and Trump.

I can tell you, at the outset, all of us have the utmost respect for Mr. Musk, and obviously respect and admiration for our President of the United States, Donald Trump.

We appreciate them, we appreciate all they do for us, for human spaceflight, for our nation. We’re thankful that they’re in the positions they’re in.

The words they’ve said — politics — I mean, that’s part of life. We understand that, and there’s an important reason why we have a political system, and the political system that we do have.

And we’re behind it 100 percent. We know what we’ve lived up here. We know the ins and outs and the specifics that they may not be privy to.

And I’m sure they have some issues that they’re dealing with, information that they have that we are not privy to.

So when I think about your question, that’s part of life. We are on board with it, we support our nation, we support our nation’s leaders and we’re thankful for them.

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