The Space
• Also read: A SpaceX mission to rescue astronauts stuck on the ISS
• Also read: With “more time”, the Boeing ship could have brought back its astronauts, judges one of them
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 1:17 p.m. Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a Dragon craft that finally docked at the station at 5:30 p.m. Sunday.
The two passengers of the mission named Crew-9, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbounov, entered the ISS shortly after 7:00 p.m. and embraced their colleagues who were floating on the ISS.
When they return, scheduled for February, they must take with them the two space veterans Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They took off at the beginning of June aboard a new vessel developed by Boeing, Starliner, for which it was the first crewed test flight to the station.
Starliner was initially scheduled to return them to Earth eight days later, but problems detected with its propulsion system led NASA to question its reliability.
After long weeks of tests, the space agency finally returned the Boeing capsule empty, and decided to bring back the two castaways with the Crew-9 mission.
Billionaire Elon Musk’s company regularly carries out rotation missions for the ISS crew.
The takeoff of Crew-9 was delayed from mid-August to the end of September to give NASA teams more time to make a decision regarding the Boeing spacecraft. The launch then had to be postponed again by a few days because of Hurricane Helene which hit Florida this week.
In total, Nick Hague and Alexandre Gorbounov will spend around five months on the ISS. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, about eight months.
Some 200 scientific experiments are planned during Crew-9’s stay aboard the flying laboratory.
