Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, the Boeing Starliner astronauts who remained in space following the spacecraft's return to Earth, will not depart the International Space Station until the spring following a schedule change from NASA.
NASA announced Tuesday it was pushing back the launch of its Crew-10 mission to late March from February. Wilmore and Williams, who joined Crew-9 following the decision for the Boeing Starliner to return to Earth uncrewed, won't return home until after Crew-10 arrives.
Boeing Starliner launched June 5 as Boeing's first crewed flight test mission. However, the launch came after previous launch delays in the weeks before, including a scrubbing minutes before a scheduled departure on June 1.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the space station on June 6 with their mission scheduled to last a week. But issues during the mission's flight with the spacecraft's thrusters and helium leaks led to multiple delays in June before an indefinite delay as NASA and Boeing worked to understand the issues and try to solve them.
After two-and-a-half months, NASA finally announced its decision Aug. 24 to have the Starliner spacecraft return to Earth uncrewed due to safety reasons. Wilmore and Williams would stay on the space station and return home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon with the Crew-9 team.
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Boeing Starliner returned to Earth in early September from the space station.
To accommodate the two Starliner astronauts joining the vehicle on the return flight, NASA trimmed their Crew-9 team from four astronauts to two. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov launched for the space station on Sept. 28.
Wilmore and Williams have been in space for 196 days. By the time Crew-10 arrives, the two will have spent more than nine months in space.
While that was far from what they were expecting when they launched in June and more than the typical six-month stint for NASA astronauts on the station, it is not a concerning amount of time to spend in space.
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Humans have spent more than a year consecutively in space with Frank Rubio holding the NASA record at 371 days.
The Crew-10 quartet flying to the space station is NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, NASA astronaut Anne McClain, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.