WATCH: SpaceX Crew Arrives On ISS To Relieve Stranded Astronauts: ‘A Wonderful Day’

A SpaceX crew docked at the International Space Station (ISS) early Sunday morning on a mission to relieve two NASA astronauts who have been stuck in space for nine months.

The SpaceX Crew-10 Dragon capsule docked at the ISS just after midnight on the east coast after launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday evening, according to the New York Post. The capsule carried a four-person crew composed of NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.

Video from the ISS showed the Dragon capsule approach and dock at the orbiting space station.

Crew 10 Dragon vehicle arriving! pic.twitter.com/3EZZyZW18b

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) March 16, 2025

Cameras inside the space station caught the moment that the Dragon crew entered the hatch of the ISS just before 2 a.m. EST. The astronauts from the Dragon and ISS greeted each other warmly with hugs and smiles.

“The hatch of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft opened March 16 at 1:35 a.m. ET and the members of Crew-10 entered the @Space_Station with the rest of their excited Expedition 72 crew,” NASA’s Johnson Space Center said in a post on X.

All the hugs. ????

The hatch of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft opened March 16 at 1:35 a.m. ET and the members of Crew-10 entered the @Space_Station with the rest of their excited Expedition 72 crew. pic.twitter.com/mnUddqPqfr

— NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) March 16, 2025

“Hi everybody down there on Earth. Crew-10 has had a great journey up here, about 28 hours to get back up to the space station,” said McClain, the Dragon crew’s commander on a live video of the docking. “And I cannot tell you the immense joy of our crew when we looked out the window and saw the space station for the first time.”

“You can hardly even put it into words.” she added, “orbiting the Earth for the last couple of days, it has been absolutely incredible.”

SpaceX undertook the mission to relieve and retrieve American astronauts Butch Willmore and Sunita Williams, who have been on the ISS since June after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft suffered technical issues and had to return to Earth unmanned. Willmore and Williams were originally expected to stay aboard the ISS for just 10 days.

“It was a wonderful day. Great to see our friends arrive,” Williams told Mission Control after the Dragon crew arrived.

Crew-10 is expected to rotate into roles on the ISS and be trained for several days before Willmore and Williams leave the station with American Nick Hague and Russian Aleksandr Gorbunov.