Delays in completing the new Crew Dragon spacecraft will extend the stay of astronauts aboard the International Space Station by a month, including two who have been there since June. On December 17, NASA announced that it was delaying the launch of the Crew-10 mission to the ISS, previously scheduled for February, until the end of March. In a statement, NASA stated that additional time should be allowed to complete the new Dragon spacecraft to be used for the mission.

“The fabrication, assembly, testing and final integration of a new spacecraft is a painstaking task that requires great attention to detail,” Steve Stich, NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager, said in a statement. he said. “In addition to the SpaceX team’s hard work in expanding the Dragon fleet to support our missions, we also appreciate the flexibility of the station program and expedition teams as we worked together to complete the new capsule’s flight readiness.”

The new Crew Dragon will be the fifth in SpaceX’s fleet, along with three Dragon cargo ships. “It’s almost done,” Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s Dragon mission control director, said at a briefing in July. He said at the time that the spacecraft was completing its final touches at SpaceX’s Hawthorne, Calif., facility and would be sent to Florida “soon” for final preparations. At the same briefing, Stitch said the spacecraft is planned for the Crew-10 mission, scheduled for February.

In its statement about the delay, NASA said that the new Crew Dragon is now expected to arrive at SpaceX’s Florida facility in January. The department does not specify specific issues causing the delay.

NASA said it was considering options, including the use of another Crew Dragon spacecraft and unspecified “obvious adjustments,” before agreeing to the delay. In addition to the Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft currently on the ISS for Crew-9, two other spacecraft, Endeavor and Resilience, recently returned to Earth after the Crew-8 and Polaris Dawn missions, respectively, and will likely not be ready until February. Initializing.

Crew-10 will continue to fly with the same crew: NASA astronauts Ann McClain and Nicole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kyrylo Peskov.

The delay will give Crew-9 additional time in space. This Crew Dragon launched in late September with NASA astronaut Nick Haig and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleksandr Gorbunov aboard. Upon arrival at the station, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore officially joined the crew. In August, NASA decided that Williams and Willmore, who had arrived at the station in June on a Boeing CST-100 Starliner, would remain on the station and bring the Starliner back to Earth without a crew due to problems with the spacecraft’s engines.

Wilmore and Williams are often described as being “stuck” or “stuck” on the station, although NASA frequently states that the duo has the ability to return to Earth in case of emergency. But this latest delay means their time on the ISS, originally planned for eight days, will be extended to nearly 10 months, assuming Crew-10 launches in late March and Crew-9 returns after that. Transfer period to ISS in early April.

The plan to use the new Crew Dragon is one of the reasons Wilmore and Williams did not return sooner. At a September briefing, Stitch said NASA had considered several options for returning astronauts and concluded that doing so aboard Crew-9 was the best choice, which required the removal of two astronauts originally scheduled for the mission.

“We can schedule it a little shorter,” he said of the Crew-9 mission, which returned before February to shorten the long stay of Starliner astronauts, “but then we’ll have to prepare another vehicle.” He suggested that preparations for the new Crew Dragon at the time did not make it possible to proceed with the launch of the Crew-10.