SATURDAY March 15, 2025 |TheNewsDESK
By Idorenyin UMOREN
With inputs from agency reports
The United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA and SpaceX successfully launched the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station on Friday, March 14, 2025, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
According to NASA, this mission carries four astronauts: NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi, and Russia’s Kirill Peskov.
The SpaceX Crew-10 mission is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Saturday evening, March 15, 2025.
The current ISS crew includes NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who arrived aboard the station in September 2024.
Following the successful docking of SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission on Saturday evening, NASA current astronauts at ISS are scheduled to return to Earth on Wednesday, March 19, 2025.
This timeline allows for a brief handover period during which they will familiarize the new crew with ongoing experiments and station protocols.
“Spaceflight is tough, but humans are tougher,” McClain said minutes into the flight, after signalling that the crew had safely reached space. “It is far easier to be enemies than it is to be friends, it’s easier to break partnerships and relationships than it is to build them.”
In June 2024, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams embarked on a mission to the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.
Originally planned as an eight-day mission, their stay was unexpectedly extended due to technical issues encountered during the journey.
The faulty Starliner was asked to fly back in September, while Williams and Wilmore were moved to a SpaceX flight due for return in February.
However, repairs were needed on the SpaceX capsule, delaying their return until mid-March after the arrival of the Crew-10 mission.