On Sunday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which is transporting NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, successfully docked with the International Space Station. Musk shared this update on X, stating, “SpaceX Dragon docks with Space Station.”
NASA confirmed in a statement that the astronauts arrived at the International Space Station at 12:04 a.m. EDT, while the station was approximately 260 statute miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Following the docking of the SpaceX Dragon with the forward-facing port of the station’s Harmony module, the crew members aboard both the Dragon and the space station will perform standard leak checks and pressurization procedures in preparation for a hatch opening scheduled for around 1:45 a.m. (US time) on Sunday.
The Crew-10 team will join the Expedition 72 crew, which includes NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Don Pettit, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Aleksandr Gorbunov, Alexey Ovchinin, and Ivan Vagner, as stated by NASA. This will increase the total number of crew members aboard the space station to 11, prior to the return of Crew-9 members Hague, Williams, Wilmore, and Gorbunov to Earth after the crew handover.
On Friday, SpaceX and NASA initiated a mission to return US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore from the ISS, where they had been for nine months. The launch occurred at 7:03 ET on Friday, utilizing a Falcon 9 rocket to carry the Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission.
The launch was prompted by US President Donald Trump’s request for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to expedite the return of stranded astronauts, ahead of NASA’s original timeline. Trump has consistently criticized former President Joe Biden for allegedly neglecting the astronauts’ situation in space.
On March 7, Trump announced that he had given Musk the authority to retrieve American astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stuck at the International Space Station (ISS) since June of the previous year.
Wilmore and Williams have been on the ISS for nine months, having arrived in June, with an initial plan for a stay of approximately one week. They were transported to the ISS using Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, which returned to Earth without a crew in September. This return was necessitated by “helium leaks” and “problems with the spacecraft’s reaction control thrusters” encountered during the docking process with the ISS, as reported by Fox News.
