CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla — After a launch pad problem forced a flight delay Wednesday, SpaceX will try again Friday to send a mission to the International Space Station to replace NASA’s two stuck astronauts.
The new crew needs to get to the International Space Station before Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams can head home after nine months in orbit.
On Wednesday evening, concerns over a critical hydraulic system arose less than four hours before the Falcon rocket’s planned liftoff from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. As the countdown clocks ticked down, engineers evaluated the hydraulics used to release one of the two arms clamping the rocket to its support structure. This structure needs to tilt back right before liftoff.
Already strapped into their capsule, the four astronauts – NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov – awaited a final decision, which came down with less than an hour remaining in the countdown.
SpaceX canceled for the day.
Friday’s planned launch is scheduled for 7:03 p.m. Eastern Time.
Once at the space station, the U.S., Japanese and Russian crew will replace Wilmore and Williams, who have been up there since June. The two test pilots had to move into the space station for an extended stay after Boeing’s new Starliner capsule encountered major breakdowns in transit.
Starliner’s debut crew flight was supposed to last just a week, but NASA ordered the capsule to return empty and transferred Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX for the return leg.
During a news conference last week, Wilmore said that while politics is part of life, it did not play into his and Williams’ return, moved up a couple weeks thanks to a change in SpaceX capsules. President Donald Trump and SpaceX’s Elon Musk said at the end of January that they wanted to accelerate the astronauts’ return, blaming the previous administration.
But Williams, in response to a question, did take issue with Musk’s recent call to dump the space station in two years, rather than waiting until NASA’s projected deorbit in 2031. She noted all the scientific research being performed at the orbiting lab.
“This place is ticking. It’s just really amazing, so I would say we’re actually in our prime right now,” said Williams, a three-time space station resident. “I would think that right now is probably not the right time to say quit, call it quits.”
Williams said she can’t wait to be reunited with her Labrador retrievers. The hardest part about the unexpected extended stay, she added, was the wait by their families back home.
“It’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” she said. “We’re here. We have a mission. We’re just just doing what we do every day, and every day is interesting because we’re up in space and it’s a lot of fun.”
Wilmore and Williams expected to be gone just a week or so when they launched last June aboard Boeing’s new Starliner capsule, making its crew debut after years of delay. The Starliner had so many problems getting to the space station that NASA ruled it too dangerous to carry anyone and it flew back empty.
Their homecoming was further delayed by extra completion time needed for the brand new SpaceX capsule that was supposed to deliver their replacements.
Last month, NASA announced the next crew would launch in a used capsule instead, pushing up liftoff to March 12. The two crews will spend about a week together aboard the space station before Wilmore and Williams depart with NASA’s Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency’s Alexander Gorbunov.
Wilmore and Williams — retired Navy captains and repeat space fliers — have insisted over the months that they are healthy and committed to the mission as long as it takes. They took a spacewalk together in January.
They will wear generic SpaceX flight suits for the ride back, not the usual custom-made outfits bearing their names because their trip home in a Dragon capsule was unplanned. That’s fine with them, although Wilmore hinted he might use a pen to write his name on his suit.
“We’re just Butch and Suni,” Williams said. “Everybody knows who we are by now.”
