Crew-10 launches to space station

WASHINGTON — Four people are on their way to the International Space Station on a typical crew rotation mission that has become enmeshed in political controversy.

A Falcon 9 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 7:03 p.m. Eastern March 14 on the Crew-10 mission to the ISS. The Crew Dragon spacecraft Endurance is scheduled to dock with the station at about 11:30 p.m. Eastern March 15.

Crew-10 is the latest in a series of routine crew rotation missions to the station. It is commanded by NASA astronaut Anne McClain with NASA’s Nichole Ayers as pilot. Takuya Onishi from the Japanese space agency JAXA and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov are mission specialists. The four will spend about six months on the ISS.

Crew-10 was originally scheduled to launch in February, but NASA postponed the mission in December because of delays completing a new Crew Dragon spacecraft that was planned to be used on the mission. NASA announced Feb. 11 that it would instead use Endurance, a Crew Dragon flown on three previous ISS missions, avoiding further delays in the new spacecraft’s development while moving up the launch from late March to the middle of the month.

At a March 7 briefing, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president for build and flight reliability, said problems with a battery on the new Crew Dragon prompted the switch in spacecraft. “It turns out the batteries are not easy to get out. It took a lot of capsule disassembly to get the battery out,” he said, noting that SpaceX teams have been focused recently on Crew-10 preparations. “We’ll turn that back around and we’ll get ready to get the new capsule ready to go fly.”

The switch to Endurance did cause some additional work before the launch. The Draco thrusters on the capsule has a higher life than those used on previous commercial crew missions, and one thruster in particular showed degradation of coatings that protect it from oxidation, Steve Stich, NASA commercial crew program manager, said at the March 7 briefing.

NASA said March 11 that SpaceX performed additional test firings of the thruster. “Following successful testing, data analysis and flight rationale were presented and accepted by NASA,” the agency stated.

The mission faced one final obstacle before launch. SpaceX scrubbed a launch attempt March 12 less than 45 minutes before liftoff because of a hydraulics problem with a clamp arm on the strongback supporting the Falcon 9. NASA said March 13 that workers “successfully flushed a suspected pocket of trapped air in the system” to correct the problem.

Crew-9 return controversy

The arrival of Crew-10 on the ISS will begin a four-day handover period before the departure of the Crew Dragon Freedom, returning the four members of Crew-9.

They include NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who flew to the station on Freedom in September. Also on board will be NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been on the station since June on a Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.

Williams and Wilmore were intended to spend as little as eight days on the ISS, but issues with Starliner extended their stay and led NASA in August to conclude that Starliner should return uncrewed because of concerns about the performance of the spacecraft’s thrusters.

That decision to leave Wilmore and Williams on the ISS has been revisited in recent weeks after SpaceX Chief Executive Elon Musk, a close adviser to President Trump, claimed in January that he had been instructed by Trump to return the two astronauts “as soon as possible” and that the astronauts were left on the ISS for political reasons by the Biden administration.

Musk and Trump have reiterated those claims several times, including in a joint interview on Fox News Feb. 18. While Musk has said he approached the Biden administration with a proposal to return Williams and Wilmore earlier, he has not provided any details about that proposal, including who in the White House he approached and when. Former NASA officials, including former administrator Bill Nelson and deputy administrator Pam Melroy, said they were unaware of any proposal SpaceX made to the White House.

Asked about these claims during the March 7 briefing, NASA and SpaceX officials said their decisions on both the timing of the Crew-10 launch and keeping Williams and Wilmore on the station until now were not driven by politics.

“We really wanted to get this mission flown before the Soyuz and before we had this critical resupply mission,” Stich said of the schedule for Crew-10, referring to a Soyuz crewed flight in early April and a cargo Dragon mission later that month. “When we laid all that out, we ended up with March the 12^th.” He added that planning predated the comments by Trump and Musk.

“I can verify that Steve had been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules, you know, a good month before there was any discussion outside of NASA, but the President’s interest sure added energy to the conversation,” added Ken Bowersox, NASA associate administrator for space operations, at the briefing.

Those officials said that NASA and SpaceX looked at options last year to return Wilmore and Williams earlier, including by adding seats to the “middeck” section of a Crew Dragon to allow it to return six astronauts rather than four.

“When it comes to adding on missions or bringing a capsule home early, those were always options, but we ruled them out pretty quickly, just based on how much money we’ve got in our budget and the importance of keeping crews on the International Space Station,” Bowersox said.

“We worked with NASA collectively to come up with the idea of just flying two crew up on Crew-9, having the seats available for Suni and Butch to come home, and that’s what NASA wanted, and that fit their plans,” Gerstenmaier said.

“The best option was really the one that we’re embarking upon now, and we did on Crew-9, flying the two empty seats,” Stich said, noting the agency followed its normal processes in selecting that option.

“That’s typically the way our decisions work,” Bowersox said. “The programs work what makes the most sense for them, programmatically, technically. We’ll weigh in at the headquarters level and in this case, we thought the plan that we came up with made a lot of sense.”

Gerstenmaier offered no details when asked what proposal SpaceX reportedly offered to the White House last fall for the return of Wilmore and Williams. “We work for NASA, and we worked for NASA cooperatively to do whatever we think was the right thing,” he said. “We were willing to support in any manner they thought was the right way to support. They came up with the option you heard described today by them, and we’re supporting that option.”

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