Stranded Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams lastly have a return date to head back to Earth, and it’s a couple of weeks previously than formerly anticipated.

NASA revealed Tuesday (Feb. 11) that the 2 astronauts, who rode to the International Space Station (ISS) on a Boeing Starliner spacecraft last June, will head home on a SpaceX Dragon pill that will leave Earth with the ISS Crew-10 on Wednesday, March 12. After a couple of days’ handover duration, Williams and Wilmore will leave the ISS with the remainder of the Crew-9 objective, after having actually invested about 250 successive days in orbit.

Williams and Wilmore were at first implied to invest about a week in area, however issues with the propulsion and helium systems on their Boeing Starliner led NASA to return the pill to Earth empty after 3 months of repairing could not fix the problems. The pill wound up landing securely in New Mexico on Sept. 7, 2024. A guard dog report simply launched by the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel discovered that brand-new thruster issues did appear throughout the descent. In October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Boeing remains in the early phases of thinking about a sale of its area organizationconsisting of Starliner.

Related: Boeing Starliner astronauts could invest almost 300 days stuck in area– is that a brand-new record?

When it comes to the stranded set, they have actually taken advantage of their time in orbit: Williams just recently climaxed for the most nonconsecutive hours of spacewalking by a female astronaut

A long-awaited homecoming

In December 2024, NASA revealed that Williams and Wilmore would return on a recently developed SpaceX Dragon pill in late March 2025 at the earliest. Now, the astronauts and the rest of Crew-9 will come home on a formerly flown Dragon pill, the Endurance. This will enable the swap in between Crew-9 and Crew-10 to take place quicker while SpaceX continues to complete the interior and last combination of the brand-new Dragon pill, according to NASA.

Together with Wilmore and Williams, astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will leave the ISS in March. They’ll be changed by NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. The accurate day of the return will be identified by climate condition near Florida, where Endurance will crash.