A live stream of the mission showed the SpaceX crew returning two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station to the orbiting laboratory on Sunday.
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 1:17 pm (1717 GMT) on Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the Crew-9 mission aboard the Dragon spacecraft and approached the ISS at 5:30 pm on Sunday.
After docking was completed, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov boarded the station just after 7:00 p.m., embracing their floating partners on the space station.
“What a wonderful day today was,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said at a news conference.
When Hague and Gorbunov return from the space station in February, they will bring back two space veterans – Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – who were forced to spend several months on the ISS due to problems with their Boeing-designed Starliner spacecraft.
The newly developed Starliner was making its first crewed flight when it delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS in June.
Welcome, #crew9After swimming through the dragon’s hatch, our new arrivals join the crew @space StationThey will spend five months in operation @ISS_Research and maintenance on the orbiting laboratory. pic.twitter.com/DJX7f9vxlg
– NASA (@NASA) 29 September 2024
They were supposed to stay there for only eight days, but after problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system surfaced during the flight there, NASA was forced to make radical changes to the plans.
After weeks of intense testing on Starliner’s reliability, the space agency ultimately decided to return it to Earth without its crew, and bring two stranded astronauts back home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.
SpaceX, the private company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, is flying regular missions every six months to allow rotation of ISS crews.
But the launch of Crew-9 was postponed from mid-August to late September to give NASA experts more time to evaluate the Starliner’s reliability and decide how to proceed.
It was then delayed a few more days due to the destructive passage of Hurricane Helene, a powerful storm that struck Florida on Thursday.
In total, Hague and Gorbunov will spend about five months on the ISS; and Wilmore and Williams, eight months.
In total, Crew-9 will conduct approximately 200 scientific experiments.
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