NEW YORK, March 8, 2025 (BSS/TASS) - The Crew-10 team, with Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) in a capsule previously used on the Crew Dragon spacecraft dubbed Endurance, which has already traveled to orbit, US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) manager for Commercial Crew Program Steve Stich said on Friday.

"We swapped over to the Dragon Endurance vehicle instead of flying a new capsule," he said in a telephone briefing with journalists. "That new capsule had a little bit of problems in production <...>. "We accelerated the launch from what would have been a late March timeframe into the march 12 timeframe with a Dragon vehicle endurance which had flown - now it'll be its fourth flight." In October 2022, Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina arrived at the ISS aboard Crew Dragon Endurance.

Stich added that the final decision to replace the capsule was made in late January. The flight schedule was not adjusted after US President Donald Trump's statement on the need for an urgent return from orbit of astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Eugene Wilmore, who have been at the station since June 2024 due to a malfunction of the Starliner spacecraft.

The Crew Dragon is expected to launch from the John F. Kennedy Space Center's pad in Florida on March 12. The crew of the vehicle also includes NASA astronauts Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, and Takuya Onishi from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov and astronauts Nick Hague, Williams and Wilmore will leave the ISS aboard the Crew Dragon in mid-March.