News: 0176721943

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

SpaceX Launches NASA's Crew-10 Mission To ISS (apnews.com)

(Friday March 14, 2025 @11:30PM (BeauHD) from the safe-travels dept.)


A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket [1]launched a four-member crew to the International Space Station on Friday night , paving the way for NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to return to Earth after being there for nine months due to issues with Boeing's Starliner capsule. Arrival is set for late Saturday night. The Associated Press reports:

> NASA wants overlap between the two crews so Wilmore and Williams can fill in the newcomers on happenings aboard the orbiting lab. That would put them on course for an undocking next week and a splashdown off the Florida coast, weather permitting. The duo will be escorted back by astronauts who flew up on a rescue mission on SpaceX last September alongside two empty seats reserved for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.

>

> Reaching orbit from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the newest crew includes NASA's Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, both military pilots; and Japan's Takuya Onishi and Russia's Kirill Peskov, both former airline pilots. They will spend the next six months at the space station, considered the normal stint, after springing Wilmore and Williams free. "Spaceflight is tough, but humans are tougher," McClain said minutes into the flight.

You can watch a recording of the launch [2]here .

Wilmore and Williams aren't stranded on the International Space Station, and they weren't abandoned, the astronauts reminded CNN in a [3]rare space-to-earth interview last month. "That's been the rhetoric. That's been the narrative from day one: stranded, abandoned, stuck -- and I get it. We both get it," [NASA astronaut Butch] Wilmore said. "But that is, again, not what our human spaceflight program is about. We don't feel abandoned, we don't feel stuck, we don't feel stranded." Wilmore added a request: "If you'll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative. Let's change it to 'prepared and committed.' That's what we prefer..."



[1] https://apnews.com/article/nasa-stuck-astronauts-spacex-boeing-e2f2e7fed6a0e65553eb72923b9357c7

[2] https://www.youtube.com/live/yf8uN4VGCCs?si=JQOcRJSuXZvAnFcz&t=14741

[3] https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/02/15/033223/iss-astronauts-give-space-to-earth-interview-weeks-before-finally-returning-to-earth



Uh-oh, the astronauts countered Trump's narrative (Score:2)

by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )

Maybe they should've waited until they got back planet-side...

Re: (Score:2)

by supremebob ( 574732 )

Yeah, I guess that they haven't been paying much attention to the news since they've been up there.

Otherwise, they would be keeping their mouths shut to avoid offending their bosses boss.

I did cancel one performance in Holland where they thought my music was so easy
that they didn't rehearse at all. And so the first time when I found that out,
I rehearsed the orchestra myself in front of the audience of 3,000 people and
the next day I rehearsed through the second movement -- this was the piece
_Cheap Imitation_ -- and they then were ashamed. The Dutch people were ashamed
and they invited me to come to the Holland festival and they promised to
rehearse. And when I got to Amsterdam they had changed the orchestra, and
again, they hadn't rehearsed. So they were no more prepared the second time
than they had been the first. I gave them a lecture and told them to cancel
the performance; they then said over the radio that i had insisted on their
cancelling the performance because they were "insufficiently Zen."
Can you believe it?
-- composer John Cage, "Electronic Musician" magazine, March 88, pg. 89