[Source: Reuters - NASA's SpaceX Crew-10 Cosmonaut Mission Specialist Kirill Peskov of Roscosmos of Russia, Pilot Nichole Ayers and Commander Anne McClain of U.S. and Mission Specialist Takuya Onishi of Japan's JAXA]

NASA is set to launch a SpaceX rocket from Florida today carrying a replacement crew for the International Space Station in a mission that sets up the return to Earth of U.S. astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – stuck in space for nine months after a trip on Boeing’s faulty Starliner.

The U.S. space agency moved up the mission by two weeks after President Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, called for Wilmore and Williams to be brought back earlier than NASA had planned.

A planned eight-day stay on the orbiting station has dragged on for Wilmore and Williams, a pair of veteran astronauts and U.S. Navy test pilots. Starliner returned to Earth without them last year.

SpaceX’s rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral at 7:48 p.m. ET (2348 GMT) with a crew of two U.S. astronauts and one astronaut each from Japan and Russia.

Wilmore and Williams have been working on research and maintenance with the space station’s other astronauts and have remained safe, according to NASA. Williams told reporters in a March 4 call that she is looking forward to seeing her family and pet dogs upon returning home.

“It’s been a roller coaster for them, probably a little bit more so than for us,” Williams said of her family. “We’re here, we have a mission – we’re just doing what we do every day, and every day is interesting because we’re up in space and it’s a lot of fun.”

The flight, known as Crew-10, normally would be considered a routine astronaut rotation. Instead, it has become entangled in politics as Trump and Musk have sought – without offering evidence – to blame former President Joe Biden for the delayed return of Wilmore and Williams.

The demands by Trump and Musk for an earlier return were an unusual intervention in NASA’s human spaceflight operations. The mission previously had a target date of March 26, but NASA swapped a delayed SpaceX capsule with a different one that would be ready sooner.

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