Poonam Nath

Sunita Williams Homecoming, NASA, SpaceX Launch Crew-10

Digital Desk: NASA and Elon Musk's SpaceX stationed a new crew to the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday (local time), allowing stranded astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore to come home after nine months.

Following a minor delay, the Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft on the Crew-10 mission hurled out from NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 4:33 a.m. (IST) on Thursday.

The four astronauts are Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Kirill Peskov of Roscosmos.

Have a great time in space, y'all!
#Crew10 lifted off from @NASAKennedy at 7:03pm ET (2303 UTC) on Friday, March 14. pic.twitter.com/9Vf7VVeGev

— NASA (@NASA) March 14, 2025

Crew-10 is the tenth voyage with a crew aboard to reach the ISS station through NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which also includes the Demo-2 test flight, and the tenth crew rotation mission under SpaceX's human space transportation system. On Thursday, a ground support clamp arm's hydraulic system malfunction caused a delay in the mission.

In June of last year, seasoned NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams became stranded on the ISS. A Boeing Starliner spacecraft problem caused the eight-day ISS trip to extend into months. Even the astronauts' scheduled return home in February of the following year was postponed.

The two stranded astronauts are expected to return to Earth a few days following the Crew-10 launch, according to NASA.