Nasa’s stuck astronauts may return to Earth sooner than expected under new plan

Nasa’s two stuck astronauts may end up back on Earth a little sooner than planned.

The space agency announced on Tuesday that SpaceX will switch capsules for upcoming astronaut flights in order to bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home in mid-March instead of late March or April.

That will shave at least a couple weeks off their prolonged stay at the International Space Station, which hit the eight-month mark last week.

“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges,” Nasa’s commercial crew programme manager, Steve Stich, said in a statement.

The test pilots should have returned in June on Boeing’s Starliner capsule after what should have been a week-long flight demo.

But the capsule had so much trouble getting to the space station that Nasa decided to bring it back empty and reassigned the pair to SpaceX.

Then SpaceX delayed the launch of their replacements on a new capsule that needed more prepping, which added more time to the astronauts’ mission.

With even more work still anticipated for the new capsule, Nasa opted for its next crew to fly up on an older capsule, with lift-off now targeted for March 12.

This older capsule had already been assigned to a private crew awaiting launch this spring.

The private flight arranged by the Houston company Axiom Space, featuring astronauts from Poland, Hungary and India, was bumped and will launch later to the space station, possibly still this spring.

Nasa prefers having a new crew arrive before sending the old one back. The new crew going up includes two Nasa astronauts, as well as one from Japan and one from Russia.