() – A SpaceX mission that will take off this Saturday aims to reunite the Boeing Starliner astronauts with the spacecraft that will bring them back home. NASA’s Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have now been on the International Space Station for more than 100 days longer than expected.
The mission, called Crew-9, is on track to lift off this Saturday at 1:17 pm ET from the Cape Canaveral Space Station in Florida. NASA will broadcast the event live through its Web page.
The space agency had previously delayed Thursday’s launch attempt, putting the spacecraft back in its hangar as Hurricane Helene threatened Florida and other parts of the southeastern United States. Once the danger passed, the mission teams readjusted everything on the launch pad.
“We left a little late this morning,” Steve Stich, director of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said at a news conference Friday. “We are vertical on the platform.”
A reserve launch window has also been set for 12:54 pm ET this Sunday in case weather or technical issues force this Saturday’s attempt to be cancelled.
Unlike other routine round trips by astronauts to the space station under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program – of which SpaceX has already launched eight – the outbound leg of this mission will only carry two crew members on place of four: NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
Two other seats will fly empty, reserved for Williams and Wilmore to occupy on the spacecraft’s return flight in 2025.
The configuration is part of an ad hoc plan that NASA decided to implement in late August, after the space agency deemed the Starliner capsule too risky to return with Williams and Wilmore. The two traveled on the Starliner to the International Space Station in early June for what was expected to be a week-long test flight.
At takeoff, Hague and Gorbunov will be strapped inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, nicknamed Freedom, which will be mounted on a Falcon 9 rocket. The launch vehicle will take off at full speed. The launch vehicle will roar and ignite nine massive engines located at its base to propel the 544,300-kilogram rocket system into the air.
After about 2 and a half minutes, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket will stop firing and separate from the second stage of the rocket. The second stage will then ignite its own engine and continue propelling the Crew Dragon capsule to more than 27,360 kilometers per hour or 22 times the speed of sound.
As the crew reaches higher speeds, the rocket’s first stage will head rearward and land on a land pad in Florida so SpaceX can overhaul and reuse the vehicle.
Once the Crew Dragon capsule reaches orbital speed, the spacecraft will separate from the Falcon 9’s second stage and begin maneuvering into orbit on its own, using onboard thrusters to gradually adjust its position so it can dock with the International Space Station, which is expected to occur around 5:30 pm ET this Sunday.
Williams and Wilmore watched on September 6 as their Boeing-built capsule returned from the station without them.
Engineers had worked for months to understand the problems with helium leaks and thruster failures that had plagued the Starliner’s journey to the space station, and NASA finally declared that there were too many uncertainties and risks to trust the vehicle. to transport the crew on their return trip. It’s unclear when Boeing’s Starliner might fly again.
NASA remains in the same situation it has been in for four years, with SpaceX as the sole provider of the space agency’s Commercial Crew Program, which was designed to hand over the task of crew rotations in the space to the private sector. International Space Station. (Boeing and SpaceX each won contracts in 2014, and SpaceX began flying routine trips in 2020, while Boeing has struggled to push Starliner development to the finish line.)
To bring Williams and Wilmore home, NASA turned to SpaceX, opting to remove two previously assigned members of its Crew-9 team to make room for Starliner test pilots.
The space agency advertisement at the end of August that NASA astronauts Stephanie Wilson and Zena Cardman would be the expelled members of the mission. Cardman was scheduled to make her first trip to space and was expected to be the commander of the Crew-9 mission.
Gorbunov, a Russian cosmonaut who got his seat thanks to a ride-sharing agreement signed between NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos, remained on the crew. And Cardman handed over the duties of commander – the highest position in a spaceflight – to Hague, who had already been named pilot of Crew-9.
“Handing the helm to (Hague) is both heartbreaking and an honor. “Nick and Alex are truly an excellent team, and they will be ready to step up,” Cardman said in a post on the social platformformerly Twitter, after the announcement.
“I just wish (Wilson), Nick, Alex and I could fly together, but we chose without hesitation to be part of something much bigger than ourselves.” Ad astra per aspera. Let’s go Crew 9.”
Meanwhile, Williams and Wilmore integrated into daily life on the space station. The duo transitioned from a lighter test mission schedule to taking on roles as full-time crew members, with Williams taking on the role of commander at the orbital laboratory.
Gorbunov and Hague will join them after docking with the space station, scheduled for this Sunday.
Asked if he was having trouble adjusting to the prospect of waiting months more to return home, Wilmore said during a Sept. 13 press conference from the space station: “I’m not going to worry about it. I mean, there’s no benefit to it. So my transition was – maybe it wasn’t instantaneous – but it was pretty close.”
Williams said he missed his family and was disappointed to miss some family events this fall and winter, but added: “This is my happy place. I love being up here in space. It’s fun. You know, every day you do something that is work, in quotes, you can do it the other way around. You can do it on the side, so it adds a little bit of a different perspective.”
Add Comment