SpaceX Crew-10 joins Crew-9’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore aboard the ISS

Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are one more step closer to returning to Earth after an initially short mission became an extended, monthslong stay aboard the International Space Station.

The Space X Dragon spacecraft carrying Crew-10, an international team of four astronauts from the U.S., Japan and Russia led by Spokane’s Anne McClain, joined Williams and Wilmore aboard the outpost at 10:35 p.m. Pacific on Saturday.

The crews will transfer duties before Williams and Wilmore return to Earth, along with two colleagues.

U.S. Space Force Col. Nick Hague, aboard the ISS, donned an alien mask while awaiting Crew-10’s passage from the space craft. Williams, all smiles, stood nearby with a photo camera in hand as Wilmore cleared and checked for any debris in the area. Ten minutes later, at 10:35 p.m., Crew-10 boarded the space station.

Crew-10’s Takuya Onishi was the first to board, welcomed with cheers, clapping, smiles and hugs , followed by Kirill Peskov and Nichole Ayers. McClain was the last to board.

“Hi everybody on Earth,” McClain said on a live feed after taking a group photo minutes after boarding. “… Let me tell you, that is such an amazing journey. You can hardly put it into words.”

Williams and Wilmore had a weeklong stint aboard the station turn into a nine-month stay after the Boeing Starliner in which they traveled to the station was deemed unfit to bring them home.

NASA scientists opted to leave the astronauts at the space station and return the Starliner empty.

Nine months is not an unusually long stay in space – many astronauts on the space station live there for months, and some have even lived there for more than a year. Williams and Wilmore have used the time to conduct experiments, many exploring what the absence of gravity does to a body.

The pair’s unexpectedly long stay in orbit has intrigued space nerds, hobbyists and members of the public alike, fascinated by their fate. Williams and Wilmore have embraced their circumstances, broadcasting regularly from the station and speaking fondly about their layover in space.

“It makes you really want to enjoy every bit of your time that you have up here,” Williams told “The Daily” last week.

Typically, the two groups of astronauts – the new arrivals and the ones about to go home – overlap on the station for up to a week, but this time, the agency said it was looking at a quicker-than-usual return, as early as Wednesday.

On Sunday night, however, NASA said it was pushing the return date even earlier, to Tuesday, to take advantage of a good weather forecast along the Gulf Coast of Florida where the astronauts will splash down. The weather is expected to be less favorable later in the week.

NASA officials want to keep handover short to conserve supplies like food.

“We don’t want to lose any good opportunities that we might have in this case,” Dina Contella, deputy manager at NASA for the space station program, said during a news conference on Friday. “We’re trying to stretch the consumables.”

Undocking is scheduled for a little after 10 p.m. Pacific on Monday.

Williams and Wilmore, along with Hague of NASA and Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency, will be in the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft – the one that Hague and Gorbunov took to space last September. The journey back will take about 17 hours.

Spokesman-Review reporter Nick Gibson contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.