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- Oct 17, 2011
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NASA will swap Dragon spacecraft on the ground to return Butch and Suni sooner
NASA can no longer wait on the development of a new Crew Dragon vehicle.At that point the pair joined the Crew-9 mission, alongside NASA's Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, and were scheduled to fly home in February. However, there was a late-developing technical issue with a new Dragon vehicle SpaceX is building, C213. Its first flight was to be Crew-10, the next NASA mission to the station. These four astronauts were to relieve Crew-9, allowing Butch and Suni to fly home. In December, NASA publicly announced a delay of the Crew-10 launch to no earlier than "late March." This would bring Crew-9 home in early April.
SpaceX and NASA are still working to resolve the C213 Dragon issue, which may be related to batteries on the spacecraft. NASA now believes the vehicle will not be ready for its debut launch until late April. Therefore, according to sources at the agency, NASA has decided to swap vehicles for Crew-10. The space agency has asked SpaceX to bring forward the C210 vehicle, which returned to Earth last March after completing the Crew-7 mission.
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