New York, Feb 12 : NASA and SpaceX are accelerating the target launch and return dates for the upcoming crew rotation missions to and from the International Space Station (ISS), which will bring the agency's stranded astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore back home. The agency's Crew-10 launch now is targeting March 12, pending mission readiness and completion of the agency's certification of flight readiness process, NASA said late on Tuesday, Xinhua news agency reported. The Crew-9 mission, consisting of Williams, Wilmore, NASA astronauts Nick Hague along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, is planned for return to Earth following a several-day handover period with the newly arrived Crew-10 crew.The previous launch date for Crew-10 was no earlier than late March. The Crew-10 mission will carry NASA astronauts Anne McClain, and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, to the space station. The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency's original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission which requires additional processing time, according to NASA.

The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft's previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency's Commercial Crew Programme safety and certification requirements. This comes as US President Donald Trump asked SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to facilitate the return of both Williams and Wilmore as soon as possible. Musk claimed that it was "terrible" that the pair were left "stranded" at the ISS for so long, even though NASA had already roped in SpaceX months ago to return both astronauts as part of its Crew-9 mission. Williams and Wilmore have been stuck in space since June last year due to technical problems with Boeing's Starliner which took them to ISS.

/IANS