Indian -origin American astronaut Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore are ready to return to Earth next week. The pair has been stuck in space for the past nine months. Both of these will now depart from SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which is going to be launched with a relief team next week.

NASA officials confirmed that the pair will return to Earth on 16 March. Nilliams and Wilmore were launched on 5 June 2024 on a crew flight test. However, after constant disturbances in their capsules, they are living on ISS. Astronauts were supposed to stay at the Starlineer spacecraft for about 10 days, but the agency had to postpone their return indefinitely due to problems in their capsules.

Return possible on 16 March
NASA's Starlineer spacecraft came back without crew in September last year. Later, NASA's astronaut Nick Hague and Cosmonot Alexander Gorbunov were sent to the ISS on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, with two seats reserved for the stranded astronauts. But that mission also failed. He was originally to return in February. Now all four astronauts will return together on 16 March.

In a press briefing, NASA's ISS program manager Dana Wigel said that since Crew-9 was launching with two astronauts, it was prudent to accommodate Williams and Wilmore to long-lasting missions.

On the other hand, NASA's crew-10 mission is scheduled to be launched from the Kennedy Space Center on March 12, which will include astronaut Anne McClen, Nicole Aires, Takuya Onishi and Kiril Peskov. Due to delay in construction, the crew will fly on endurance capsules instead of the new crew dragon spacecraft.