NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will remain aboard the ISS until February 2025 due to safety concerns with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. They were initially scheduled to return in June but will now return on a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission, extending their stay to over eight months.
Wilmore and Williams launched on Boeing's Starliner in June 2024 for a test flight. However, technical issues, including thruster failures and helium leaks, led NASA to decide against using Starliner for their return, opting instead for SpaceX's Crew Dragon.
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The International Space Station is a modular space station in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project between five participating space agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, and CSA.
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Space Exploration Technologies Corp., trading as SpaceX, is an American aerospace manufacturer and space transportation services company headquartered in Hawthorne, California.
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. Federal Government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research.
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The Boeing Company is an American multinational corporation that designs, manufactures, and sells airplanes, rotorcraft, rockets, satellites, telecommunications equipment, and missiles worldwide.
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Tyler Nicklaus Hague is an American flight test engineer and a NASA astronaut of the class of 2013. Selected to be a flight engineer on the International Space Station, his first launch was on Soyuz MS-10, which aborted shortly after take-off on 11 Octobe
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Oleg Dmitriyevich Kononenko is a Russian cosmonaut. He has flown to the International Space Station five times as a flight engineer for Expedition 17 aboard Soyuz TMA-12, as a flight engineer on Expedition 30 and commander of Expedition 31 aboard Soyuz TM
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Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country mainly located in Central Asia with a smaller portion west of the Ural in Eastern Europe.
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The Roscosmos State Corporation for Space Activities, commonly known as Roscosmos, is a state corporation responsible for the wide range and types of space flights and cosmonautics programs for the Russian Federation.
It had several precursors:
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Stephanie Diana Wilson is an American engineer and a NASA astronaut. She flew to space onboard three Space Shuttle missions, and is the second African American woman to go into space, after Mae Jemison.
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Boeing Starliner is a class of reusable crew capsules expected to transport crew to the International Space Station and to private space stations such as the proposed Bigelow Aerospace Commercial Space Station.
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Sunita Lyn Williams is an American astronaut and United States Navy officer who formerly held the records for most spacewalks by a woman and most spacewalk time for a woman.
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Cape Canaveral, from the Spanish Cabo Cañaveral, is a cape in Brevard County, Florida, United States, near the center of the state's Atlantic coast.
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Soyuz is a transliteration of the Cyrillic text Союз (Russian and Ukrainian, 'Union'). It can refer to any union, such as a trade union (profsoyuz) or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́че
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Aleksandr Vladimirovich Gorbunov (Russian: Александр Владимирович Горбунов; born May 24, 1990) is a Russian cosmonaut who is planned to fly on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission in September 2024. Before joining the cosmonaut corps, he