Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent his well wishes to the crew of the SpaceX-NASA mission to retrieve the two stranded astronauts on the International Space Station ahead of their launch tonight.
Both of the stranded astronauts are former Navy officers and several of the astronauts on their way to retrieve them are active-duty military members. The Army, Navy, and Air Force are all represented.
“To the SpaceX/NASA Crew-10,” Hegseth said in a post on X. “We are praying for you. We wish you Godspeed, and we look forward to welcoming you all home soon.”
Hegseth said in an accompanying video that stranded astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams are former Navy captains. Wilmore and Williams have been stuck aboard the space station since June of last year after it was determined the Boeing Starliner they came there on would be too dangerous to return aboard.
“Now, the Department of Defense is also proud to have multiple branches and two active-duty U.S. military officers represented in the mission that’s kicking off tonight between NASA and SpaceX,” Hegseth said on Wednesday. “U.S. Army Col. Anne McClain and U.S. Air Force Major Nichole Ayers. So this is Army, Air Force, and Navy tonight.”
“I just want to take a brief moment and to say that we’re praying for you,” he added.
The mission on Wednesday night is expected to lift off around 7:48 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
McClain and Ayers, along with Japanese mission specialist Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, will be aboard the craft. While conducting the mission, the crew will do over 200 experiments, including material flammability tests that will contribute to “future spacecraft and facility designs,” according to NASA.
The agency also said the astronauts will be the test subjects themselves, with one crew member leading a study on how space affects the body and mind.
WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT THE STRANDED NASA ASTRONAUTS RETURNING TO EARTH AFTER NINE MONTHS IN SPACE
President Donald Trump has vowed to bring the astronauts home. “Elon [Musk] is right now preparing a ship to go up and get them,” the president told Fox News last week. “We love you, and we’re coming up to get you, and you shouldn’t have been up there so long.”
Space travel is dangerous. An unmanned SpaceX Starship spacecraft exploded in space last week, prompting several flights to be delayed or redirected for fear of debris impacts.
The most recent major NASA space crash occurred in 2003 when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated upon its reentry to Earth, killing all seven astronauts aboard the spacecraft.
