Boeing Starliner crew’s long-awaited return delayed to March

The two Boeing Starliner astronauts kept unexpectedly on the International Space Station since June have had their stay extended again because the next crew will arrive later than originally anticipated, NASA said this week.

Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams were previously expected to return in February after spending several months longer in orbit than planned. But NASA said Tuesday that the next ISS crew, which NASA calls Crew-10, will not fly into space before late March. The astronauts who will be leaving the station, including Williams and Wilmore, will spend about five days helping to train the new arrivals, NASA said.

“Known as a handover period, it allows Crew-9 to share any lessons learned with the newly arrived crew and support a better transition for ongoing science and maintenance at the complex,” NASA said in a statement released Tuesday.

NASA and SpaceX pushed Crew-10’s flight to March because they need more time to process the new Dragon spacecraft set to arrive in Florida in January. The space agency noted that the process of building, testing and preparing a new spacecraft is a “painstaking endeavor” that requires great attention to detail.

Wilmore and Williams initially were supposed to spend several days aboard the station in June, as part of a test flight for Boeing’s capsule, but NASA opted to return Starliner to Earth without a crew because of misfiring thrusters and helium leaks. The space agency decided the Starliner crew would go back in February on a SpaceX Dragon capsule.

Crew-10 includes astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. They will replace Williams and Wilmore as well as two Crew-9 members, Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov.

NASA has emphasized that the Starliner crew members are not stranded on the station, since spacecraft docked there give them a way to evacuate at any time. NASA recently completed two resupply flights to keep the station stocked with food, water, clothing and oxygen.

The current stay of Williams and Wilmore is longer than the six-month average for astronauts aboard the space station, NASA said, but even a nine-month stay wouldn’t register among the longest human trips in space. Astronaut Frank Rubio spent 371 days aboard the space station in 2022 and 2023, and the record is held by Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, who spent 437 days abroad Russia’s Mir space station in the mid-1990s.