By now, I thought that story of President Trump asking Elon Musk to get Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back down from the space station was well and truly over. I did a piece last week, Thursday Jan. 30 and I thought it was over then.
Until today.
It's being reported that NASA is going to change the plans they've been working to and are moving the Crew-10 mission from early April much closer to the originally planned mid-March date. That could conceivably have Butch and Suni - along with their two Crew-9 crewmates, NASA's Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov - return to Earth as early as March 19th, about two weeks ahead of the currently published date.
Bringing the two astronauts back to Earth next month will require some shuffling of spacecraft here on the ground and a delay of the privately operated Axiom-4 mission to the International Space Station to later in the spring.
When the Crew-9 return was delayed, the explanation was that problems with certifying the Crew-10 Dragon Capsule, designated C213 by SpaceX, were the cause.
SpaceX and NASA are still working to resolve the C213 Dragon issue, which may be related to batteries on the spacecraft. NASA now believes the vehicle will not be ready for its debut launch until late April. Therefore, according to sources at the agency, NASA has decided to swap vehicles for Crew-10. The space agency has asked SpaceX to bring forward the C210 vehicle, which returned to Earth last March after completing the Crew-7 mission.
The next flight of C210, named Endurance, had been assigned to Axiom Space for their next mission to the ISS, Axiom 4, which seems to have a date of No Earlier Than April penciled in. The source material doesn't specifically say that they've swapped the two so that Axiom 4 gets the new C213 with Crew-10 getting the older C210 capsule.
Sources said SpaceX is now working toward a no-earlier-than March 12 launch date for Crew-10 on Endurance. If this flight occurs on time—and the date is not certain, as it depends on other missions on SpaceX's Falcon 9 manifest—the Crew-9 astronauts, including Wilmore and Williams, could fly home on March 19. They would have spent 286 days in space. Although not a record for a NASA human spaceflight, this would be far longer than their original mission, which was expected to last eight to 30 days.
I know this completely unrelated to reality but Crew-10 seems to go well with C210, and since 1+3 = 4, C213 seems to go better with Axiom 4. Just kidding.
Neither C210 or C213, this is the Crew Dragon used for the Inspiration 4 mission in September of '21, simply because it's a pretty picture of a Dragon capsule. Image credit: SpaceX
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