NASA and SpaceX are making final preparations for the Crew-9 astronaut flight to the International Space Station (ISS), which is set to launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, September 26.
But this will be the first of SpaceX’s 13 crewed flights to the ISS since the first one in 2020 where there will be two empty seats on the Crew Dragon spacecraft. And there’s a very good reason for that. Let us explain.
In recent weeks, there’s been a lot of news coverage about a couple of NASA astronauts — Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — being “stranded” on the space station after their Boeing-made Starliner spacecraft suffered issues on its first crewed flight to orbit in June. Despite the difficulties, the capsule docked with the ISS and delivered the two astronauts to the space station.
After much effort was made to try to resolve the Starliner issues, NASA decided to err on the side of caution by bringing the troubled spacecraft home empty in a successful mission that took place last weekend.
The decision to bring the Starliner home without Williams and Wilmore meant that their brief 10-day mission suddenly became a lengthy eight-month stay aboard the orbital outpost, because their ride home will now be 0n the Crew Dragon that’s arriving next week.
Crew-9 originally had four astronauts assigned to it, but two of them — Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson — have been told they’ll have to sit out the flight, with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos astronaut Aleksandr Gorbunov taking two of the four seats inside the capsule.
At the end of their six-month mission, Hague and Gorbunov will fly home alongside Williams and Wilmore aboard the Crew Dragon, bringing to an end one of the most extraordinary and unexpected missions ever to have taken place at the ISS.
