Elon Musk, to the rescue. After months of uncertainty and occasional scares, the two astronauts the Starliner took to the International Space Station and remained “trapped” there due to the Boeing ship’s failures, They begin to see the end of their adventure more closely. The SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the ISS took off today at 7:17 p.m. time of the Spanish peninsula, after several delays, the last caused by a tropical storm which forced the Falcon 9 rocket to be returned to the hangar.
The rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex-40 at the Space Station at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with only two specialists, instead of the usual 4. Nick Hague, NASA astronaut, and Aleksandr Gorbunov, cosmonaut from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, travel aboard the Crew Dragon capsule. The mission, initially designed as an additional rotation for the ISS crew (replacing some astronauts with others), became a rescue mission after the successive problems suffered by the Starliner.
Two NASA astronauts beginner Zena Cardman and veteran Stephanie Wilson remained on the floor to give way to Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who initially They were only going to spend 10 days in space and they have been there for monthssince they will not return until February 2025 aboard this SpaceX Crew-9 capsule. For their part, Hague and Gorbunov will carry out the usual work of space station “inhabitants”, carrying out experiments and improvements to the ISS systems with the rest of the crew.
They also travel aboard the capsule mass simulators in the two empty seats so as not to deviate the center of gravity of the ship during the launch and two SpaceX suits for Willmore and Williams, since the ones they used on their outbound flight are not compatible with the Crew Dragon in which they will have to return.
The crew change for the Crew-9 was decided in August, after NASA and Boeing spent months jointly examining the Starliner spacecraft, whose latest problem with the propulsion system while docking with the ISS has sowed doubt about both the space agency and the company.
Willmore and Williams were reassigned to new duties on the International Space Station as their original mission expanded, to participate in new tests and experiments. Ultimately, NASA decided the risk was too high to return to Starliner, and the spacecraft returned without a crew on September 6. This is another achievement for SpaceX, which lacks competitors to meet the needs of NASA’s commercial crew program.
