On Wednesday, NASA and SpaceX delayed the start of a replacement team from four astronauts to the international space station, which would have started the long-awaited return home of US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sununi Williams.

NASA was supposed to start a SpaceX rocket from Florida with a replacement team for the international space station in a mission that would set up the return to the earth of Wilmore and Williams after a trip to Boeing’s incorrect starliner in space.

The start was discontinued due to a hydraulic system problem with a floor support clamp for the Falcon 9 rocket, NASA said in an explanation.

Starting teams are working to tackle the problem, according to another explanation.

NASA said that it was now aimed at a start that had only stopped a starting attempt on the flight route from Dragon on Friday at 7:03 p.m. Edt (2303 GMT) after mission managers on Thursday.

With a Friday crew 10 start, the crew 9 mission with astronaut Wilmore and Williams would leave the space station on Wednesday, March 19, it said.

The US world space agency had raised the mission for two weeks after President Donald Trump and his advisor Elon Musk, CEO von SpaceX, Wilmore and Williams had previously recalled to be earlier than planned.

A planned eight-day stay on the orbit has moved on for Wilmore and Williams, both the veteran astronauts and the US navy test pilots. Starliner returned to earth without them last year.

The SpaceX rocket should be picked up at 7.48 p.m. ET (2348 GMT) with a crew of two US astronauts and an astronaut from Japan and Russia from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.

Wilmore and Williams worked on research and maintenance with the other astronauts of the space station and have remained safe, according to NASA. In a call on March 4, Williams said that she is looking forward to seeing her family and dogs home.

“It was a roller coaster for her, probably a little more than for us,” said Williams about her family. “We are here, we have a mission – we only do what we do every day, and every day is interesting because we are in space and it’s a lot of fun.”

The flight known as a crew-10 is usually regarded as a routine astronaut rotation. Instead, it was involved in politics when Trump and Musk – without providing evidence – blamed the former President Joe Biden for the delayed return of Wilmore and Williams.

Trump and Muschus’ demands after an earlier return were an unusual intervention in the human spatial flight operations of NASA. The mission previously had a target date of March 26, but NASA exchanged a late SpaceX capsule with another that would be finished in the past.

When the new crew arrives on board the station, Wilmore, Williams and two others -Nasa -Astronaut Nick Hague and the Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov -can return to Earth in a capsule that has been connected to the station at the station since September.

Wilmore and Williams can only go after the new crew 10 craft, so that according to NASA, the ISS is for maintenance with enough US astronauts.

Wilmore and Williams flew to the first Boeings Starliner test team in June to the station, which suffered from drive system problems in space. NASA thought it was too risky for the astronauts to fly home on the Boeing trade. This led to the current plan to bring them home in a SpaceX capsule.

Boeing The Starliner under a contract over 4.5 billion US dollars with NASA to compete with the Crew Dragon Capsule from SpaceX, which has been the US space agency’s only vehicle since 2020 to send ISS -crew members from American soil into orbit. The mission of the last year had marked the first test flight of Starliner with astronauts on board, a prerequisite before NASA was able to certify the capsule for routine astronaut missions.

The development of Starliner has been plagued with technical problems and cost crossing since 2019 and was back far behind the SpaceX crew, which was developed as part of a similar NASA contract worth at least 4 billion US dollars.