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NASA and SpaceX have postponed the Crew-10 mission set to bring home two stranded astronauts at the International Space Station.

Some shit you should know before you read: If you’re unaware, Astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams have been on the International Space Station (ISS) for over 9 months, despite their mission originally being planned for just one week after launching on June 5, 2024. They were part of Boeing’s first crewed test flight of the Starliner spacecraft, which has faced numerous technical problems, including helium leaks, faulty thrusters, and software bugs. These issues caused multiple delays and ultimately resulted in SpaceX being tasked with bringing both astronauts back to Earth.

What’s going on now: Yesterday, an attempt to launch NASA and SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station (ISS) was scrubbed less than an hour before liftoff due to a hydraulic issue with a ground support clamp arm on the Falcon 9 rocket. The clamp arm, which helps secure the rocket in place before launch, experienced a malfunction that prompted officials to delay the mission for safety reasons. As a result, the four Crew-10 astronauts—NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi, and Russia’s Kirill Peskov—will have to wait until at least Friday, March 15 for another launch attempt.

Once Crew-10 successfully reaches the ISS, there will be a brief handover period where they transition into their new roles, allowing the current Crew-9 astronauts, including NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to prepare for their long-awaited return to Earth. If Crew-10 launches on Friday as planned, docking with the ISS is expected to occur on March 16, followed by about a day of overlap between the two crews. Wilmore, Williams, and the rest of Crew-9 will then board SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule and begin their journey home, with undocking scheduled for March 17, pending favorable weather conditions at the designated splashdown site.

The return process itself will take multiple hours, as Crew Dragon will first perform a series of maneuvers to safely exit ISS orbit before re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Once the capsule re-enters, it will deploy parachutes and splash down off the coast of Florida, where a recovery team will retrieve the astronauts and transport them back to land.

This all comes as Republicans and Democrats have traded blames over the extended stay of astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. President Trump and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk have repeatedly claimed that the Biden administration delayed an earlier rescue for political reasons, with Musk suggesting that NASA could have launched a separate mission to bring the astronauts home sooner. Meanwhile, Democrats and NASA leadership have framed the return as a routine part of ISS crew rotations, arguing that accelerating a separate mission would have been unnecessary and prohibitively expensive.