After your journey of a week turned into a month-long stay on the International Space Station, two Boeing Starliner astronauts will soon join the spaceship that will take them back home .
The capsule SpaceX Crew Dragon chosen by NASA to transport astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore back to Earth after their Starliner spacecraft was deemed too risky for the crew, is approaching the space station. The vehicle, on a mission called Crew-9, should dock around 6:30 pm (Brasília time) this Sunday (29) .
Aboard the SpaceX vehicle are NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. Beside them are two empty seats, saved to be occupied by Williams and Wilmore when the group returns to Earth next year.
Hague and Gorbunov were launched aboard the Crew Dragon this Saturday afternoon (28) from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida.
Although they reached their intended orbit without problems, SpaceX later revealed that the second stage, or upper part, of the Falcon 9 rocket that powered the first part of the trip had a problem after separating from the capsule.
“Following the successful launch of Crew-9, the Falcon 9 second stage was jettisoned into the ocean as planned, but suffered an unusual orbit burn,” the company shared in a post on X, formerly Twitter. “As a result, the second stage landed safely in the ocean, but outside the target area.”
SpaceX indicated it would pause flights using the Falcon 9 — the world’s most frequently launched rocket — while it explored the anomaly. “We will resume the rollout after we better understand the root cause,” the company said in post X.
THE CNN has reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration for comment.
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule Crew-9 spent about a day traveling through orbit as it prepared to dock with the International Space Station. Once safely docked with one of the station’s docking ports, the spacecraft will open its hatch, allowing Hague and Gorbunov to join the other astronauts already aboard the orbiting laboratory.
Together, Hague, Williams, Wilmore and Gorbunov will complete SpaceX’s Crew-9 team. The group will spend about five months aboard the space station before returning home, no earlier than February.
Williams and Wilmore first traveled to the International Space Station in early June aboard a Boeing Starliner spacecraft for what was expected to be a weeklong test mission.
However, problems with helium leaks and thruster malfunctions left engineers scrambling to figure out what went wrong — and NASA ultimately decided that Starliner’s problems were not well enough understood for the space agency to allow Williams and Wilmore to return. on board.
Instead, Starliner flew home empty on September 6.
After deciding not to return Williams and Wilmore to Earth on Starliner, NASA opted to reorganize SpaceX’s flight plans, removing two other astronauts — spaceflight veteran Stephanie Wilson and Zena Cardman, who was making her first trip to space — from Crew-9 mission to make way for the Starliner team.
But that meant NASA astronauts would have to fulfill the duties of the original Crew-9 team, taking up months of routine work on the space station before their return trip.
Both Williams and Wilmore — veterans of previous missions to the space station — said they easily adapted to the idea of remaining in space until next year, with Suni noting that the microgravity environment is their “happy place.”
Completing the team currently aboard the International Space Station are Don Pettit, from NASA, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, from the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The three arrived at the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle on September 11.
Pettit and Gorbunov traveled aboard spacecraft developed outside their home countries as part of a seat swap agreement between NASA and its Russian counterpart.
Meet the Crew Dragon, the spacecraft that will “save” Starliner astronauts
This content was originally published in SpaceX rocket has trouble landing; Crew-9 is arriving at the ISS on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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