SpaceX’s two-person Crew-9 mission arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) today (Sept. 29) after a one-day orbital chase.
Crew-9’s Crew Dragon capsule, named Freedom, docked with the ISS today at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT).
The hatches between the two spacecraft are expected to open around 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT), and ISS astronauts will deliver welcoming remarks about 25 minutes later. You can watch those milestones live via NASA and here at Space.com, if the agency makes its stream available.
Crew-9 launched Saturday afternoon (Sept. 28) from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov into orbit.
It was the first-ever human spaceflight to lift off from SLC-40. And Hague, who’s a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, became the first active member of that relatively new military branch to reach space.
Crew-9 is notable in another way as well. SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules usually ferry four people to the International Space Station, but NASA cut Crew-9’s astronaut manifest in half to save seats for two people already on the orbiting lab who need a ride home.
That duo — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — arrived at the ISS in June on the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Their mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but Starliner suffered thruster problems in orbit, and NASA extended the capsule’s stay at the ISS to study the issue.
The agency eventually decided that bringing Wilmore and Williams home on Starliner was too risky. So the capsule returned to Earth uncrewed on Sept. 7, and its former crew will come home on Freedom with Hague and Gorbunov when Crew-9 ends, in February 2025.
Wilmore and Williams are two of nine astronauts who were living aboard the ISS before Crew-9’s arrival. The other seven are NASA’s Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps and Donald Pettit, and cosmonauts Alexander Grebenkin, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner.
Barratt, Dominick, Epps and Grebenkin came up with SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission in March. They will head back down to Earth not long after Crew-9 arrives, if all goes according to plan.
Source: https://www.space.com/spacex-crew-9-astronaut-mission-iss-docking
