India, March 15 -- NASA and SpaceX successfully launched a long-awaited crewed mission on Friday to bring back US astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been stranded on the International Space Station (ISS) for nine months.

A Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon capsule fixed to its top blasted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:03pm (local time), carrying a four-member team bound for the orbital outpost.

The four astronauts - NASA's Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov - are heading to the International Space Station on the Crew-10 mission to replace Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore and two others.

Once their spacecraft arrives and docks at the ...