Known as Endurance, the spacecraft was next due to fly the private Axiom-4 mission to the space station later this spring. Sources said SpaceX is now working toward a no-earlier-than March 12 launch date for Crew-10 on Endurance. If this flight occurs on time—and the date is not certain, as it depends on other missions on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 manifest—the Crew-9 astronauts, including Wilmore and Williams, could fly home on March 19. They would have spent 286 days in space. Although not a record for a NASA human spaceflight, this would be far longer than their original mission, which was expected to last eight to 30 days.
The plight of Butch and Suni has become increasingly political in the last 10 days, after Donald Trump began his second term in the White House. A little more than a week ago, Trump said, “I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration. They have been waiting for many months on Space Station. Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe. Good luck.”
Musk, the founder of SpaceX, referred to the two astronauts as “stranded” and blamed the Biden administration for leaving them in space so long.
Politics versus pragmatism
With NASA now potentially advancing the return of Wilmore and Williams by about two weeks, from early April to mid-March, Trump and Musk may seek to score a political win. But the underlying facts paint a different picture, suggesting pragmatic rather than political rationale.
The plan for Butch and Suni’s return was finalized by NASA last August, and Musk signed off on it as chief executive of SpaceX at the time. Their original return date on Crew-9 was delayed due to a technical problem with a SpaceX vehicle. In recent months, as NASA has monitored development of the C213 vehicle, they worked on a contingency plan involving the swapping of Axiom’s spacecraft. This plan was set into motion before Trump came into office. It has now been greenlit.
At this point, if NASA waited for C213 to be ready to launch the Crew-10 mission, the space station program would start to approach ‘redlines’ on food, water, and other supplies for crew members on board the station. The agency is also juggling a lot of competing priorities in terms of cargo and crew missions to the station. The bottom line is that they really needed this crew rotation to occur sooner rather than later.
