The Falcon 9 rocket propelling the NASA-SpaceX Crew-10 mission was set to blast off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday at 7:48 pm (2348 GMT).
“There was an issue with the hydraulic system on the ground side,“ NASA launch commentator Derrol Nail said, adding that “everything was fine with the rocket and the spacecraft itself.”
NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stranded aboard the ISS since June after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft developed propulsion issues and was deemed unfit for their return. It came back empty.
That Crew-9 spacecraft now docked at the ISS can only return to Earth after the one carrying Crew-10 arrives.
Crew-9 was set to depart on Sunday, weather permitting, for an ocean splashdown off the Florida coast. It was not immediately clear if that timeline was still feasible.
Space remains an area of cooperation between the United States and Russia despite the Ukraine conflict, with cosmonauts traveling to the ISS aboard SpaceX Crew Dragons and astronauts doing the same via Soyuz capsules launched from Kazakhstan.
Wilmore and Williams’s prolonged stay has recently become a political flashpoint, as President Donald Trump and his close advisor Elon Musk have accused ex-president Joe Biden’s administration of abandoning the pair.
However, with Trump now in office for nearly two months, the astronauts are still set to return as originally planned.
One astronaut who backed Musk however was Wilmore, who offered contradictory statements in last week’s press conference.
The Crew-10 team consists of NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japan’s Takuya Onishi, and Russia’s Kirill Peskov.
“I’m looking forward to breaking bread with those guys, talking to them, giving them big hugs,“ she said of Wilmore and Williams.
During their mission, the new crew will conduct a range of scientific experiments, including flammability tests for future spacecraft designs and research into the effects of space on the human body.
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