Crew Dragon spacecraft arrives at International Space Station to relieve stranded astronauts
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were due to return to Earth last June, but were prevented from doing so by a technical problem with the Starliner spacecraft.
Crew members of the Crew Dragon spacecraft on the ISS.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft arrived Sunday at the International Space Station (ISS) to relieve astronauts that were trapped for more than nine months, live-streamed images showed.
Shortly after 12:04 a.m. ET, television aired images of the Crew Dragon astronauts embracing their counterparts on the space station.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stranded on the International Space Station last June because of a technical problem with the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that had brought them and was scheduled to bring them back to Earth.
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Starliner, making its first manned flight, had thruster problems and was deemed unfit to bring them back.
What was supposed to be a trip lasting a few days turned into a nine-month stay for Wilmore and Williams, longer than the usual six-month rotations.
The space agency reported in a statement that "NASA and SpaceX met on Sunday to assess weather and splashdown conditions off Florida’s coast for the return of the agency’s Crew-9 mission from the International Space Station. Mission managers are targeting an earlier Crew-9 return opportunity based on favorable conditions forecasted for the evening of Tuesday, March 18."
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