(NewsNation) — After nine months in space, NASA’s two stuck astronauts are just days away from returning to Earth.
Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are waiting for their replacements to arrive at the International Space Station before they return home later this month.
NASA announced Monday the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that will launch the Crew-10 mission is currently on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its four-person replacement crew — including two astronauts from NASA, one from Japan and one Russian cosmonaut — is expected to lift off shortly before 8 p.m. on Wednesday.
The crew is scheduled to dock at the ISS outpost Thursday morning, but Wilmore and Williams will not return immediately as they work through a handover period with their newcomers.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the handover is “quite routine.”
“A crew four is going up. It has to dock. It has to meet up with the space station dock. The crew gets out, they hug each other, and then the other crew gets in. It’s not happening instantly, but I think of it. It’s a bus,” he said.
The exact date of their return is unknown, but NASA said it could be as soon as March 16.
‘We’re going to get them back’: Elon Musk
“Yes, we’re bringing them back in a few weeks,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said when asked about the mission during an interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox Business on Monday.
“We’re going to get them back,” he emphasized.
Musk has been working to retrieve the astronauts, who were left behind on the ISS due to malfunctions with their original ride home, Boeing’s Starliner capsule.
Musk has claimed his efforts to bring Wilmore and Williams back home had previously been stonewalled by the Biden administration for “political reasons.”
‘Everybody knows who we are by now’: Suni Williams
Wilmore and Williams were expected to be gone just a week or so when they launched last June aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which made its 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.
The astronauts’ homecoming was further delayed by the extra completion time needed for the brand new SpaceX capsule meant to deliver their replacements.
Last month, NASA announced the next crew would launch in a used capsule instead, moving liftoff up 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 Russia’s Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Wilmore and Williams — retired Navy captains and repeat space fliers — have insisted over the past 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 was unplanned. 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.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.