Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams became full crew members on the International Space Station after the Starliner spacecraft returned to Earth empty
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams greeted the flight crews and said goodbye to the Starliner spacecraft that launched them to the station on June 5. The unmanned Starliner detached from the front hatch of the Harmony module on Friday, September 6 at 18:04 p.m. ET andIt parachuted to land in New Mexico nearly six hours later. Wilmore and Williams will remain in low Earth orbit until their scheduled return in February aboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft with the Crew-9 mission.
The new tenants of the space station
The two longtime station dwellers enjoyed a three-day weekend with fellow NASA astronauts Tracy Dyson, Matthew Dominique, Mike Barratt and Janet Epps. But Wilmore, Williams and Epps spent a few moments Monday afternoon preparing equipment for human research activities. The three made a special hip sleeve that they are investigating its ability to reverse the direction of fluid flow towards the head caused by space for astronauts and possibly prevent them from vision problems and help them adapt to different gravity environments.
Preparations for docking Soyuz
Expedition 71 commander Oleg Kononenko prepared the Rasvet module for the docking of the Soyuz MS-26 crew ship scheduled for Wednesday at 15:33 p.m. Kononenko organized tools and luggage and cleared space inside Rasvat and prepared sleeping positions for the new crew members. The Soyuz rocket will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 12:23 a.m. Wednesday carrying NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexei Ovechinin and Ivan Wagner to the space station for a six-and-a-half-month mission.
Kononenko also joined fellow cosmonauts Nikolai Chuv and Alexander Grabenkin in testing the lower-body negative pressure suit's ability to counterbalance the effects of weightlessness on the human body and help crew members adjust more quickly to returning to Earth's gravity. Kononenko and Chuv are scheduled to return to Israel with Dyson in the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft at the end of September. Grabenkin is scheduled to return in early October with SpaceX Crew-8 crew members Dominique, Barratt and Epps.
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