In August last year, NASA announced that Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore would return to Earth in February in a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. That was their substitute ride for a more immediate trip home in the troubled Boeing Starliner spacecraft that had taken them to orbit.
So why are they just now returning to Earth in the second half of March, a month later than planned? The answer comes down to problems with another SpaceX capsule.
Once the decision was made to send Starliner back to Earth empty, Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore became official members of the space station’s crew. NASA does not like the space station to be understaffed. Normally, there are seven astronauts from NASA, the Russian space agency and other space agencies.
So generally before a group of astronauts leave, their replacements need to arrive first. For Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore, that meant that their stay in orbit could end once Crew-10 — the next Crew Dragon and its four astronauts — came aboard the space station.
For Crew-10, NASA and SpaceX were planning to launch a brand-new Crew Dragon, but SpaceX ran into trouble building that capsule because of defective batteries. In December, NASA thought the problems could be fixed in time for a launch in late March. But concerned that the delays could slip into April, NASA and SpaceX eventually decided to swap the new capsule for an older, previously flown one.
“We really wanted to get this mission flown” before schedule conflicts with other spacecraft scheduled to arrive at the space station, Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s commercial program, said during a news conference before the Crew-10 launch.
As NASA was contemplating these decisions, Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, posted on X in late January that President Trump had asked SpaceX to bring back Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore “as soon as possible.”
Hours later, Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, “Elon will soon be on his way.”
The next day, NASA said it was working for the astronauts to return “as soon as practical.” A couple of weeks later, it announced that it was moving up the launch date of the relief crew by a couple of weeks to mid-March.
“We were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the president and Mr. Musk,” Mr. Stich said in the news conference.
Kenneth Bowersox, the associate administrator for NASA’s space operations directorate, said, “I can verify that Steve had been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a good month before there was any discussion out of NASA.”
Mr. Bowersox added, “But the president’s interest sure added energy to the conversation.”
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