NASA joins SpaceX for mission to safely bring astronauts Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore home

NASA and SpaceX successfully launched a much-awaited crewed mission on Friday to return US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stuck at the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months.

NASA and SpaceX successfully launched

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Crew Dragon capsule attached to its top left the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03pm (local time), carrying a four-person team for the orbital outpost.The four space travelers - NASA's Nichole Ayers and Anne McClain, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov - will travel to the International Space Station aboard the Crew-10 mission to replace Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore and two others.

Spacecraft lands and docks on the ISS

After their spacecraft lands and docks on the ISS on March 15, the four astronauts will get accustomed for a couple of days before assuming responsibility from Crew-9, which would then leave no earlier than March 19. SpaceX and the US space agency had scheduled to send a replacement crew of four astronauts from Florida on March 12, a mission known as Crew-10, but a last-minute issue with the rocket's ground systems caused a delay.

NASA announced that SpaceX had fixed the problem

On March 13, NASA announced that SpaceX had fixed the problem - draining a suspected pocket of air from a hydraulic clamp arm - and that the weather was 95% per cent favorable for a March 15 launch. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams spent nine months stuck in space after their journey on Boeing's Starliner. The two astronauts, together with US Navy test pilots, were the first humans to test-fly Boeing's Starliner spacecraft to the ISS.

Astronauts on the station for political motives

But what was meant to be an eight-day mission, was dramatically extended by technical problems with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. The Starliner returned empty instead, without suffering further serious problems.The mission has also been drawn into politics with US President Donald Trump and his advisor Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, accusing former president Joe Biden left the astronauts on the station for political motives.