Starliner astronauts' replacement crew arrive at International Space Station
The Crew 10 Dragon capsule caught up with the International Space Station and moved in for a textbook docking early Sunday, bringing four fresh crew members to the lab and clearing the way for the Starliner astronauts to return to Earth after nearly 300 days in space.
Approaching from behind and below, the Crew Dragon, launched Friday evening from the Kennedy Space Center, passed 1,300 feet directly under the station before looping up to a point 720 feet directly ahead of the outpost. From there, it glided straight in for docking at the Harmony module's forward port at 12:04 a.m. EDT.
Motorized latches then engaged to pull the capsule into the docking mechanism for an airtight structural seal. After standard leak checks and umbilical connections, the crew opened the Dragon's forward hatch at 1:35 a.m. and floated into the space station.
Crew 10 commander Anne McClain, an Army colonel and former combat helicopter pilot, told flight controllers she and her fellow fliers had a "great trip" from the launch pad to the space station, adding "I cannot tell you the immense joy of our crew when we looked out the window and we saw the space station for the first time."
"Let me tell you, that is such an amazing journey, you can hardly even put it into words," she said. "The ride up on the Falcon 9, orbiting the Earth for the last couple of days, it's been absolutely incredible ... Thank you very, very much."
"Thank you to SpaceX for the awesome ride up here," said co-pilot Nichole Ayers, an Air Force major and F-22 Raptor pilot. "As a (space) rookie, that was one of the coolest things I've ever done. I can't wait to get to work up here."
McClain, Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov -- both veteran commercial airline pilots — are replacing Crew 9 commander Nick Hague, cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, Starliner commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and his pilot, Sunita Williams.
Three other crew members, cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Donald Pettit, were launched to the station last September aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They're scheduled to return to Earth next month.
Wilmore and Williams were launched last June 5 on the first piloted test flight of Boeing's Starliner astronaut ferry ship. The flight was originally expected to last about eight days.
But during rendezvous with the space station, the Starliner experienced propulsion system problems and NASA eventually ruled out bringing the crew down on the Boeing spacecraft.
Instead, the astronauts were told to remain aboard the station while the Starliner returned to Earth on its own. NASA then bumped two astronauts from the next station flight — Crew 9 — freeing up two seats for use by Wilmore and Williams.
When Hague and Gorbunov reached the station, Wilmore and Williams joined them to become part of Crew 9 for a normal six-month tour of duty.
Now that Crew 10 has arrived, Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams will help familiarize their replacements with space station operations before undocking and returning to Earth next week with a splashdown in the Gulf near the coast of Florida.
At landing, Wilmore and Williams will have logged nearly 290 days in space since launch last June. While a long flight by any standard, it's still well short of the U.S. record for a single flight — 371 days — set by astronaut Frank Rubio in 2022-23.
Ironically, Rubio's record was the result of another extended mission, this one the result of a major coolant leak in the Russian Soyuz he launched aboard. The Russians decided not to bring the crew down aboard their original spacecraft and instead launched a replacement.
Rubio ended up spending a little more than a full year in space, twice as long as he originally expected.
Given Williams' two previous stays aboard the space station, she will move up to No. 2 on the list of most experienced U.S. astronauts with around 570 days in space overall, depending on the actual launch date. Only former astronaut Peggy Whitson has more time aloft among U.S. astronauts: 675 days over four flights.
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History does not record if Sally Ride rolled her eyes when she got a look at the plans for the first toiletry kit NASA put together for its female astronauts—but she'd have been within her rights to do so. The space agency certainly knew how to pack for men, providing them more or less the basics—deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, razor. The women would get the essentials too, but there would be more: lipstick, blush, eyeliner, and, critically, up to 100 tampons—because who-all knew just how many the average woman would need during the average week in space? That first toiletry kit was planned before June 18, 1983, when Ride went aloft on the shuttle Challenger, becoming the first American woman in space, breaking the gender barrier the Soviets had broken with cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, just over 20 years to the day earlier. The tampon nonsense was not the only indignity NASA's female astronauts in general and Ride in particular had to endure. Her story is chronicled in the evocative new documentary Sally, a 2025 winner of the Sundance Film Festival 's Alfred P. Sloan feature film prize. Among the memorable moments Ride experienced was the pre-flight press conference during which a TIME magazine correspondent raised his hand and asked, 'Dr. Ride, a couple of fast questions, sir…ma'am.' There was, too, the reporter who pointedly asked Ride 'Do you weep?' when confronted with a particularly knotty problem during training. There was the bouquet of flowers Ride was handed after the shuttle landed, intended as a gift to America's first space heroine—a gift Ride politely refused to accept, sparking all manner of criticism in the mainstream press. More important than all of that, though, was the private— exceedingly private—side to Ride, most notably her 27-year relationship with her life partner Tam O'Shaughnessy, a marriage-in-all-but-name that wasn't revealed until Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012 at age 61, and O'Shaughnessy told the world in the obituary she wrote to mark her mate's passing. Not long before Ride died, O'Shaughnessey gently broached how—and whether—she should reveal their more-than quarter century secret. 'I asked Sally about that. I said, you know, 'I'm kind of worried. I don't know what I'm going to write, you know, how I'm going to navigate this,'' O'Shaughnessy recalled in a recent conversation with TIME, ahead of the release of the film. 'And she said, 'You decide. Whatever you decide will be the right thing to do.'' The film, written, produced, and directed by Cristina Constantine, premiers on the National Geographic channel on June 16, and becomes available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on June 17. As it reveals, Sally and Tam made a lot of right—and tough—choices in the time they had together, and Ride did much the same when it came to the professional trajectory that took her to space. There is no minimizing just how alien the notion of female astronauts was at the start, at least in the U.S. The film includes a clip of Gordon Cooper, one of NASA's original seven astronauts, being interviewed in the early 1960s. 'Is there any room in the space program for a woman?' the reporter asked. 'Well,' Cooper answered without a trace of a smile, 'we could have used a woman and flown her instead of the chimpanzee.' It wasn't until 1976, a decade and a half after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, that NASA opened up its astronaut selection process to women and people of color. 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The two met when Ride was 13 and O'Shaughnessey was 12 and they were standing in line to check in to play in a tennis tournament in Southern California, where they both grew up. Ride repeatedly rose restlessly to her tiptoes, and O'Shaughenessy said, ''You're walking on your toes like a ballet dancer,'' she recalls in the film. 'That kind of started our friendship. Sally was kind of quiet, but she would talk for eight minutes straight on different players and how to beat 'em, how to whup 'em.' The two grew quickly close, but went in different directions, with Ride studying physics at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania for three semesters beginning in 1968 and later at UCLA for the summer semester before transferring to Stanford as a junior, and O'Shaughnessey becoming a professional tennis player from 1971 to 1974, ultimately playing in both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon. O'Shaughnessy accepted her sexuality early, openly, and enthusiastically. 'I was on the tennis circuit and there were a few queer women,' she told TIME. 'But it was also just the atmosphere, even the straight women. No one really cared who you slept with…I was going to the gay bars in San Francisco and dancing with my friends.' For Ride, things were different. When she was at Stanford she fell in love with her female roommate and the two were together for four years. But Ride insisted on keeping the relationship largely under wraps and that secrecy was a no-go for her partner. 'She couldn't stand being so closeted and decided to move on with her life,' says O'Shaughnessy. Ride would later choose an opposite sex partner, marrying fellow astronaut Steve Hawley in 1982, a move that was more than just an accommodating pose for a public figure in a country not ready for same-sex marriage, but less than a true union of the heart. 'They were really good friends,' O'Shaughnessy says. 'They had a lot in common. He was an astronomer, Sally was a physicist. 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