NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 International Space Station mission—which, among other things, will return stranded astronauts Butch Williams and Sunita (Suni) Williams, is ready for launch on 12 March, pending weather and a few technical issues, NASA announced today in a late-afternoon press conference.
“The whole team polled ‘go to proceed,’ pending closure of some open work,” says Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.
The mission will bring four new astronauts to the space station—two American, one Russian, and one Japanese—then, as early as March 16, return four others, including Butch and Suni, whose mission has now been stretched from a few days to nine months due to technical problems with the Boeing Starliner capsule that was supposed to bring them home, months ago.
More recent issues, says Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s commercial crew program at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, involve a coating on the thrusters of the SpaceX capsule currently planned for the two astronauts’ retrieval, already used for three previous missions. “This will be its fourth flight,” Stich said, noting that its thruster coatings are starting to show signs of wear.
At the moment, Stich noted that NASA and SpaceX are in the process of “hot-firing” one such thruster, putting it through not only a normal mission cycle, but three more, “plus a couple extra contingency cycles,” in order to make sure that it is still safe.
But the biggest issue will be the “rescue” of the two Williams, Butch and Suni.
Not that they were ever in dire straits. The Starliner flight that sent them to the International Space Station was a test flight, and one of the reasons test flights are done is to find out if they work, said Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program, manager. In fact, she said, Butch and Suni’s training had explicitly prepared them for an extended stay in the ISS, just in case.
Furthermore, Bowersox noted, “Butch and Suni are experienced astronauts. We knew they’d be great additions to the crew, and for most astronauts, spending extra time in orbit is really a gift, [so] we thought they’d probably enjoy their time there.”
That said, their return date proved problematic. Publicly, US President Donald Trump and SpaceX owner and Trump advisor Elon Musk have called for their quick return, but it’s not clear that this had much effect. Yes, NASA kept changing the proposed return date, first delaying it when a new capsule, originally planned for their return, hit a couple of snags (“very typical when you’re building a new capsule,” Stich says), then expediting it when the decision was made to reuse the current capsule.
The logistics of supplying the ISS is very complex, Weigel said. The problem, she says, began when a Northup Grumman resupply flight, called NG-22, hit a snag. It was originally scheduled for February, but “they had to do some rework on the vehicle and push it out to June,” she said. That produced a supply issue, she said, because “we usually fly a combination of research [equipment], food, water, and spare [parts].” The delay of that launch shifted the priority toward food and other consumables.
Meanwhile, a Soyuz mission is scheduled to arrive in April and the replacement for NG-22 is scheduled for late April. “When we laid out all those things,” Stich says, “we really wanted the [crew] mission flown before Soyuz and this critical resupply mission, so we looked at the March timeframe.”
“I can verify that Steve [Stich] has been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a good month before there was any discussion outside of NASA,” Bowersox said.
The worries about food and other consumables have even played a role in the scheduled return of Butch and Suni Williams to Earth. Normally, Weigel said, crew changes involve a five-day transition, as outgoing astronauts familiarize incoming ones with the station, and their duties.
This time, it will be cut to two days, Weigel says, “to conserve consumables onboard.” Not that this means the remaining astronauts are at imminent risk of starvation. “What this does for us,” she said, is [to] open more opportunities”—meaning less chances of being delayed by bad weather. “Space station resupply is complex.”
NASA astronauts Anne McClain, commander and Nichole Ayers, pilot, along with mission specialists JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, are targeted to launch at 7:48 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, March 12, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA Kennedy to the International Space Station.
This will be McClain’s second spaceflight since becoming a NASA astronaut in 2013. During her first mission, McClain spent 204 days as a flight engineer during Expeditions 58 and 59, and completed two spacewalks, totaling 13 hours and 8 minutes. Since then, she has served in various roles, including branch chief and space station assistant to the chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office. Follow @astroannimal on X and @astro_annimal on Instagram.
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