NASA announces plan to bring Starliner crew home next month

NASA plans to bring the two Starliner astronauts back to Earth, along with their two space station crewmates, around March 19-20, shortening their long-extended stay in orbit by about two weeks, the agency announced Tuesday.

The slightly earlier-than-planned trip home was made possible by a tentative decision last week to switch the next set of station fliers — Crew 10 — to a different Crew Dragon spacecraft, one that can be ready for launch as early as March 12, with weather and other factors considered.

After a five-to-seven-day handover to bring their Crew 10 replacements up to speed on the ins and outs of space station operation, Crew 9 commander Nick Hague, cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, Starliner commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and co-pilot Sunita Williams, will undock and head back to Earth.

They'll come home aboard the Crew Dragon that carried Hague and Gorbunov to the station last September, along with two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams.

Assuming the dates hold up, Wilmore and Williams will have logged nearly 290 days in orbit since launch June 5 on a mission originally expected to last a little more than one week. That's how long Boeing and NASA managers thought it would take to complete the Starliner's first piloted test flight.

As it turned out, the Starliner, built as part of a NASA program to develop independent commercial crew ships to ferry astronauts to and from the space station, ran into propulsion problems and propellant leaks that prompted weeks and then months of tests and analysis.

In the end, NASA managers decided the risks were too high to bring Wilmore and Williams down aboard the Starliner. Instead, they opted to bring the ship down by remote control, without its crew, and to keep Wilmore and Williams aboard the station until they could ride home with Hague and Gorbunov at the end of the Crew 9 expedition.

NASA originally planned to bring all four back to Earth in February, but late last year, another month was added to the mission because of work needed to ready the Crew 10 Dragon for launch.

President Trump last month blamed the Starliner crew's overall mission extension on the Biden administration, which he said had "abandoned" the two astronauts in space. He said he had asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk to "go get" Wilmore and Williams. Musk also blamed Biden in a post on X.

But the Biden administration had no known influence on NASA's decision to extend the Starliner crew's mission, a plan that has been in place since last September when the Crew 9 spacecraft was launched with a two-man crew and two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams.

And in any case, there was no need to "go get" the astronauts given the Crew 9 spacecraft, the Starliner crew's ride home, has been docked at the space station for the past five months.

Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, Japan's Takuya Onishi and cosmonaut Kirill Peskov now plan to blast off around 7:48 p.m. EDT on March 12.

The launch date depends on a variety of factors, including an on-schedule launch of a commercial moon lander from the same pad on Feb. 26 and, of course, the weather.

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