NASA, SpaceX launch mission to bring astronauts Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore home

A Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon capsule fixed to its top blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03pm (local time), carrying a four-member team bound for the orbital outpost.

The four astronauts - NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov - are heading to the International Space Station on the Crew-10 mission to replace Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore and two others.

Once their spacecraft arrives and docks at the ISS on March 15, the four astronauts will spend a few days adjusting before taking over operations from Crew-9, which would then depart no sooner than March 19.