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Four astronauts arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, paving the way for Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams to finally come home after being stuck in space for more than nine months.
NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov came via the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which is set to take home Wilmore and Williams as soon as Tuesday.
NASA is expediting the return due to good weather conditions on the ground, which might change later in the week.
“We don’t want to lose any good opportunities that we might have in this case,” Dina Contella, deputy manager at NASA for the space station program, said in remarks reported by The New York Times. “We’re trying to stretch the consumables.”
Wilmore and Williams headed to space on June 5 for an approximately eight-day mission. But their short trip was derailed after issues with the Boeing Starliner that took them there prevented the astronauts from using it for the return. NASA eventually made a deal with Elon Musk’s Space X to bring the astronauts home.
“It makes you really want to enjoy every bit of your time that you have up here,” Williams said of her extended stay in space.
Musk claimed without evidence that the Biden administration abandoned the two astronauts in space rather than collaborate with him, saying the former president did not want to make a supporter of now President Donald Trump look good.
When asked about this, Wilmore declined to address it directly. “We have no information on that ... what was offered, what was not offered, who it was offered to, how that processes went,” he said. “That’s information that we simply don’t have.”