Crew-10 launched in March 2025 carrying Anne McClain, Nichole Ayers, Takuya Onishi of Japan and Kirill Peskov of Roscosmos, and its arrival was watched more closely than most rotations because it was the flight that finally released Wilmore and Williams to come home.
That handover had become unusually political. The extended stay had been widely and inaccurately described as an abandonment, with public claims that the crew had been left up there for political reasons rather than engineering ones; NASA and the astronauts themselves spent months correcting the framing, generally without much success.
The crew itself was notable for its pilots. McClain, an Army helicopter pilot and rugby international, commanded; Ayers was an Air Force fighter pilot flying her first mission. Onishi, a former airline pilot, took command of the station during the expedition, becoming the third Japanese astronaut to hold the position.
The expedition's research programme continued the station's late-life emphasis on preparing for missions beyond low orbit — radiation monitoring, plant growth systems, materials that might be manufactured in orbit — alongside the continuous maintenance that a structure approaching thirty years old increasingly demands.
By this point the rotation had become genuinely routine, which is worth noting given how recently it was not. A commercial capsule on a reused rocket, carrying an international crew to a station in its third decade, arriving on schedule, is an operational achievement that would have seemed improbable when the Shuttle retired in 2011.
