This week will see a special maneuver at the International Space Station (ISS) as a SpaceX Crew Dragon takes one of the tiniest flights ever, hopping just a few meters over from one port of the station to another. And NASA will live stream the event, so you’ll be able to watch the spacecraft take this short flight as it happens.
The changeover is necessary to make space for another SpaceX craft that will arrive on Monday, October 4. But this new arrival won’t carry any crew as it is a cargo craft, part of the 31st commercial resupply services mission by SpaceX. This new arrival will dock at the forward-facing port on the Space Station’s Harmony module, as it is easiest for craft to dock there than on the space-facing side. But the Crew Dragon is currently occupying this port, so it needs to undock, move to the other space-facing port, and redock there.
To move the Crew Dragon, it will be loaded up with a crew consisting of NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
These four make up a rather unusual Crew-9, as only Hague and Gorbunov traveled to the Space Station on their Crew Dragon, which flew with just two crew members for the first time in its operational history. The other two members, Williams and Wilmore, had traveled to the station on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner, but following problems with the Starliner’s thrusters, NASA officials opted not to have them travel back on the Starliner but rather to stay on the ISS and become members of Crew-9 instead. Now, they will travel back to Earth in their Crew Dragon in February next year.
The crew are aiming to undock from the ISS for their short flight at 6:35 a.m. ET on Sunday, November 3, then will perform the maneuver in under an hour with the aim to redock at 7:18 a.m. ET. To get an idea of what this looks like in practice, you can see a previous redocking of another Crew Dragon spacecraft that occurred in May this year.
How to watch the maneuver
You’ll be able to watch the live stream on NASA’s YouTube channel, where coverage will begin at 6:15 a.m. ET on Sunday, November 3, and will run continuously until the redocking maneuver is complete.
