NASA’s two stuck astronauts are just a few days away from finally returning to Earth after nine months in space. On Wednesday evening, the crew replacements for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi and Russian cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft named Endurance. Liftoff of the four-person crew is scheduled for 7:48 p.m. Eastern. The Crew-10 astronauts are scheduled to arrive at the space station Thursday, around 6 a.m. Eastern. During a news conference last week, Wilmore said that while politics is part of life, it did not play into his and Williams' return, moved up a couple weeks thanks to a change in SpaceX capsules. President Donald Trump and SpaceX's Elon Musk said at the end of January that they wanted to accelerate the astronauts' return, blaming the previous administration. But Williams, in response to a question, did take issue with Musk's recent call to dump the space station in two years, rather than waiting until NASA's projected deorbit in 2031. She noted all the scientific research being performed at the orbiting lab. “This place is ticking. It's just really amazing, so I would say we're actually in our prime right now,” said Williams, a three-time space station resident. “I would think that right now is probably not the right time to say quit, call it quits.”