Ln Sunday September 29, the capsule supposed to rescue the two “stranded” ISS astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore docked with the ISS. The Falcon 9 rocket took off on September 28 at 1:17 p.m. local time (6:17 p.m. Belgian time) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying a Dragon craft which finally docked at the station on Sunday at 5:30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. GMT).
The two passengers of the mission named Crew-9, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexandre Gorbounov, entered the ISS shortly after 7:00 p.m. (00:00 a.m. Belgian time) and embraced their colleagues who were floating in the ISS.
“I just want to welcome our new comrades from Dragon Freedom,” said station commander Suni Williams, stranded aboard the ISS with astronaut Butch Wilmore.
“Alex, welcome to the International Space Station, and Nick, welcome home,” she added. Nick Hague has already spent six months aboard the ISS in 2019.
On their return, scheduled for February, Nick Hague and Alexandre Gorbounov must take Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore with them. 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 will have spent about eight months.
Some 200 scientific experiments are planned during Crew-9’s stay aboard the flying laboratory.
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