SpaceX’s mission to return two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) has been underway since June. As the BBC wrote, the Dragon capsule, containing two empty seats for Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, took off on Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The pair’s mission to the space station was only supposed to last eight days, but after experiencing a malfunction in their new Boeing Starliner, they returned to empty Earth as a precaution. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov are now transporting new supplies for Butch and Sonny and plan to bring them home in February.
The Dragon capsule was scheduled to launch on Thursday but was postponed due to Hurricane Helen, which left a trail of destruction across Florida, northern Georgia, Tennessee and the Carolinas. SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, transports crews to and from the International Space Station every six months.
The Dragon capsule is scheduled to dock with the International Space Station today, Sunday, September 29, at approximately 10:30 pm Italian time. Under a contract between NASA and the Russian federal space agency Roscosmos, Russia’s three-seat Soyuz spacecraft carries a NASA astronaut on each trip to the International Space Station and an astronaut flies on each four-seat Dragon spacecraft.
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