Having a docked ship is not enough. There must be a docked ship on station at all times for evacuations. The thing that was needed was another ship to take some people back and not everyone (well, all but any Russians, since they have their own ships).
Wrong, they could have packed all 4 astronauts (the 2 that came to the ISS on the dragon and Suni and Butch) into the docked dragon and returned at any point. They only waited for the next dragon (crew 10) so that not only the 3 people using the Soyuz would be left on the ISS. But this would have absolutely been possible. The remaining crew would have used their Soyuz in emergencies anyways, they don’t need the dragon.
There's way more than just them. Thanks to all the delays the 4-man SpaceX Crew-8 [1] stayed on the ISS until October 23rd, becoming the longest Dragon stay ever. And the 3-man crew from Soyuz MS-26 got there on September 11th, and is still there.
In fact reading the Soyuz MS-26 Wiki, one of the many records this whole debacle ended up breaking is that when the MS-26 entered into space, there were more humans in space than ever before, with a total of 19!
Did you read my comment? Currently, there is one Dragon and one Soyuz docked to the ISS. If Crew-9 had left earlier, before the Crew-10 Dragon had arrived, there would have been only the Soyuz left.
Do the Soyuz still touch down in a desert in a place like Kazakhstan or do they touch down on water nowadays? The desert solid ground touch downs seem so brutal.
Soyuz is always landing on ground (except in emergencies, and Soyuz 23 broke through a frozen lake). They do have Retro rockets that are fired shortly before contact and dampened Seats, but from the reports I heard, it's still a very rough landing.
But Crew 10 had also been planned for a while, so the narrative that Trump ordered a new ship to go up "NOW" can't be true. For example, heres a post about NASA moving the launch date to March, in December last year: https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/commercialcrew/2024/12/17/nasa-ad...
This is definitely true. The only questions are: a) could they have gone back home on the retrofitted seats on Crew 8 or b) could there had been a Crew 10 sooner to allow them to go home on Crew 9 sooner. I don't really know what's up with those questions.
