CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The two astronauts stuck at the International Space Station since June welcomed their new ride home with Sunday's arrival of a SpaceX capsule.
SpaceX launched the rescue mission on Saturday with a downsized crew of two astronauts and two empty seats reserved for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who will return next year. The Dragon capsule docked in darkness as the two craft soared 265 miles above Botswana.
NASA switched Wilmore and Williams to SpaceX following concerns over the safety of their Boeing Starliner capsule. It was the first Starliner test flight with a crew, and NASA decided the thruster failures and helium leaks that cropped up after liftoff were too serious and poorly understood to risk the test pilots' return. So Starliner returned to Earth empty earlier this month.
The Dragon carrying NASA's Nick Hague and the Russian Space Agency's Alexander Gorbunov will remain at the space station until February, turning what should have been a weeklong trip for Wilmore and Williams into a mission lasting more than eight months.
Two NASA astronauts were pulled from the mission to make room for Wilmore and Williams on the return leg.
NASA likes to replace its station crews every six months or so. SpaceX has provided the taxi service since the company's first astronaut flight in 2020. NASA also hired Boeing for ferry flights after the space shuttles were retired, but flawed software and other Starliner issues led to years of delays and more than $1 billion in repairs.
Starliner inspections are underway at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, with post-flight reviews of data set to begin this week.
The arrival of two fresh astronauts means the four who have been up there since March can now return to Earth in their own SpaceX capsule in just over a week. Their stay was extended a month because of the Starliner turmoil.
Although Saturday's liftoff went well, SpaceX said the rocket's spent upper stage ended up outside its targeted impact zone in the Pacific because of a bad engine firing. The company has halted all Falcon launches until it figures out what went wrong.
The first victim of the shutdown was a planned launch Sunday from California of a Falcon 9 with a plan to send up the OneWeb Launch 20 mission for EutelsatGroup.
The Federal Aviation Administration still has that launch on its operations plan advisory for as early as Oct. 1, but the last two times SpaceX had an "off-nominal" issue with a Falcon 9 launch, the FAA grounded the rocket.
The most recent was a fiery landing of a Falcon 9's first-stage booster last month during a Starlink mission.
"The FAA investigates commercial space incidents to determine the root cause and identify corrective actions so they won't happen again," the FAA said in a statement after that incident.
After that launch, SpaceX led an investigation and submitted a final report to the FAA, which was approved. That turnaround was quick with the failed booster landing happening on Aug. 28, the report filed and submitted with a request to return to flight on Aug. 29 and approval on Aug. 30.
But a third incident this year in July, which also involved the second stage, took longer to investigate.
In that incident, the FAA grounded Falcon 9 for two weeks when the video feed of a launch from California on July 11 showed the second stage's engine freezing over in space. It resulted in SpaceX not being able to put its payloads into a correct orbit.
Any significant delay in launches could affect the upcoming Falcon Heavy launch of NASA's Europa Clipper mission to send a massive satellite to Jupiter's icy moon Europa.
Information for this article was contributed by Marcia Dunn of The Associated Press and Richard Tribou of the Orlando Sentinel (TNS).