The two NASA astronauts who have been stuck on the International Space Station for more than seven months are scheduled to finally return home in March, sooner than expected.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stranded on the space station since they left Earth on June 5, 2024 aboard Boeing’s Starliner aircraft, which experienced helium leaks and propulsion system issues. Wilmore and Williams became aware of the issues once they docked at the space station.

SpaceX’s Dragon aircraft is scheduled to launch on March 12 to head to the space station, then return home with Wilmore and Williams after a handover period of several days, NASA said. The sped-up timeline comes after the agency said in December that late March would be the earliest launch date.

“Human spaceflight is full of unexpected challenges. Our operational flexibility is enabled by the tremendous partnership between NASA and SpaceX and the agility SpaceX continues to demonstrate to safely meet the agency’s emerging needs,” Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in a Tuesday statement. “We greatly benefit from SpaceX’s commercial efforts and their proactive approach in having another spacecraft ready for us to assess and use in support of Crew-10.”

The official portrait of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 members with, from left to right, Mission Specialist Kirill Peskov of Roscosmos; Pilot Nichole Ayers and Commander Anne McClain, both NASA astronauts; and Mission Specialist Takuya Onishi from JAXA. (NASA/Bill Stafford/Helen Arase Vargas)

“Boeing’s on board with that. We’re all on board with that,” Wilmore said at the time. “We found some things that we just could not get comfortable with putting us back in the Starliner when we had other options.”

Crew-10 will be using a previously flown Dragon aircraft that will mark its fourth mission to the space station, after it previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights, according to NASA.