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There is a unique SpaceX mission underway.
A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida today (September 28) at 1:17 PM EDT (1717 GMT), beginning the Crew-9 astronauts' mission. To space. NASA's International Space Station (ISS).
“It's been an amazing ride,” NASA astronaut Nick Hague, commander of Crew-9, said over the radio to SpaceX launch control after arriving in orbit with crewmate Alexander Gorbunov of Russia. Astronauts will arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday, September 29. You can follow the mission through SpaceX's live mission update page.
It was the first launch of astronauts ever from SLC-40, SpaceX's first launch pad in Florida, which has seen several unmanned launches over the years. SpaceX and NASA spent two years updating the platform with a new crew launch tower, access arm, and emergency escape slide to prepare it for astronaut flights.
However, the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule aboard Crew-9 flight were not new. SpaceX previously used the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket to launch an unmanned Starlink mission. About 8 minutes after launch, the booster returned to Earth for a soft landing at SpaceX's Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The Dragon capsule has flown three other missions to the ISS: NASA's Crew-4 flight and two Axiom Space commercial flights, Ax-2 and Ax-3.
The new launch pad is not the only novelty for Crew-9. The mission's Dragon capsule, named Freedom, will transport only two people to the ISS instead of the usual four. Freedom is providing two seats for Crew-9's flight back to Earth in February, because two NASA astronauts already there need a ride home.
Those two astronauts are Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, who arrived at the International Space Station in June on the first crewed mission of Boeing's Starliner capsule. Their pioneering journey was only supposed to last 10 days or so; However, the Starliner suffered problems with in-orbit propulsion, so NASA continued to extend the mission to figure out how to deal with the anomaly.
Ultimately, the agency decided to bring the Starliner home without a crew, which it did without incident on September 7.
Related to: SpaceX's Crew-9 astronaut flight for NASA: How it turned into a rescue mission
Thus Williams and Willmore remained aboard the ISS, and Crew-9 was modified to make room for them on the return flight: NASA astronauts Zina Cardman and Stephanie Wilson were removed from the mission, leaving only Nick Hague and Alexander Gorbunov on the launch manifest.
“I think it was hard not to watch that rocket go off and not think, 'This is my rocket and this is my crew,' but I also know that I'm not the only one who can think that,” Cardman, the original commander of Crew-9, said after watching the launch. Her voice would break sometimes. “There are many people who have done this mission, there are people in orbit who will take this capsule home, and it makes me very happy to know that I am one of the many people who can say that this is my crew.”
NASA officials said they will work to reassign Cardman and Wilson to a new mission in the future.
“Crew changes are not easy,” NASA deputy administrator Pam Milroy, a former space shuttle commander, said in a post-launch news conference. “It's very difficult for Nick and Alex. It's also difficult for Zeina and Stephanie. But I think that's a reflection of the fact that human spaceflight is complex and dynamic, and we need to be agile and mission-focused.”
Mission specialist Gorbunov works for the Russian space agency Roscosmos. Hague, the commander of Crew-9, is a veteran NASA astronaut and colonel in the US Space Force. In fact, this marks another first for Crew-9: No active member of the Space Force, founded in December 2019, has flown on a space mission before, although NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins switched from the US Air Force to the force Satellite. While aboard the International Space Station in 2020.
Crew-9 was scheduled to launch on Thursday (September 26), but liftoff was postponed for two days due to Hurricane Helen. If all goes according to plan from here on out, Freedom will dock with the ISS on Sunday (September 29) at 5:30 PM EDT (2230 GMT), and the hatches between the two spacecraft will open for about an hour and 45 minutes. Later. You'll be able to watch both of these accomplishments live via NASA and here on Space.com if, as expected, the agency makes its broadcast available.
As its name suggests, Crew-9 is the ninth long-duration astronaut mission to the International Space Station launched by SpaceX for NASA.
Elon Musk's company also has six other crewed orbital flights under its belt — the Demo-2 test mission to the International Space Station in 2020, three flights to Axiom Space's orbital laboratory in Houston, and a free-flight effort funded and led by tech billionaire Jared. Isaacman. The most recent flight that Isaacman has piloted, Polaris Dawn, occurred just last month.
Like SpaceX, Boeing has a multibillion-dollar deal to fly NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But it's unclear when Starliner will be allowed to begin crewed flights, given the problems it encountered in its recent test flight.
By the way, mission extensions and data mixing are not unheard of on astronaut missions on the International Space Station. For example, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and astronauts Sergei Prokopyev and Dmitry Petlin blasted off to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for a supposed six-month stay in September 2022. However, their Soyuz spacecraft developed a leak a few months later , and there was no leakage of the trio. They will not ultimately return to Earth until September 2023, aboard a replacement Soyuz spacecraft launched by Russia empty to accommodate their return home.
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include post-launch comments from NASA's Pam Milroy. SpaceX's Crew-9 astronauts will arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday, September 29, starting at 3:30 PM EDT (1930 GMT). The docking is scheduled to take place at 5:30 PM EST (2130 GMT). Follow our SpaceX mission update page To watch the live docking of Crew-9.
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