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After a week-long journey and a month-long stay aboard the International Space Station, two Boeing Starliner astronauts are now within touching distance of the spacecraft that will eventually bring them home.
After astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore’s Starliner spacecraft were deemed too dangerous for the crew, the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule selected by NASA to take them back to Earth arrived at the space station. The vehicle, called Crew-9, docked with the ISS around 5:30 pm on Sunday.
The SpaceX vehicle is carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Korbunov. With them are two empty seats, saved for Williams and Wilmore to occupy when the team returns to Earth next year.
At 7:15 pm ET, the capsule’s hatch is expected to open, allowing Hague and Korbunov to enter the space station. A welcome ceremony is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET with Hack, Korbunov, Williams, Wilmore and seven other employees currently at the orbiting lab.
Hack and Korbunov launched aboard Crew Dragon on Saturday afternoon from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Although they reached their desired orbit without incident, SpaceX later revealed that the second stage, or upper part, of the Falcon 9 rocket that powered the first part of their journey encountered a problem after it separated from the capsule.
“Following today’s successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9’s second stage disposed of at sea as planned, but experienced a nominal deorbit burn,” the company shared. Post on XThe social media platform was formerly known as Twitter. “As a result, the second stage landed safely at sea, but outside the target area.”
SpaceX indicated it was suspending flights using the world’s most frequently launched rocket — the Falcon 9 — as it investigated the anomaly. “We will resume after we better understand the root cause,” Company X said in the post.
CNN has reached out to the Federal Aviation Administration for comment.
Meanwhile, Crew-9’s SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule spent a day in orbit. Before docking with the International Space Station. Once safely docked in one of the station’s docking ports, the shuttle will open its hatch, allowing Hack and Korbunov to join the other astronauts already in the orbiting lab.
Together, Hack, Williams, Willmore and Korbunov will complete SpaceX’s Crew-9 team. The crew will spend about five months on the space station before returning home in early February.
Williams and Willmore first traveled to the International Space Station in early June aboard the Boeing Starliner spacecraft.
But problems with helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters left engineers scrambling to figure out what was wrong — and NASA eventually decided the Starliner’s problems weren’t enough for the space agency to let Williams and Wilmore back aboard.
Instead the Starliner flew home empty on September 6.
After deciding not to return Williams and Wilmore to Earth aboard the Starliner, NASA decided to reorganize SpaceX’s flight plans and launch two more astronauts – astronaut Stephanie Wilson and Gina Cartman, who was set to make her first trip into space. -9 Mission Starliner gives way to the team.
But Williams and Wilmore must fulfill the duties of the original Crew-9 crew, performing months’ worth of routine work on the space station before their return trip. Space agency officials said availability of space shuttles and ISS requirements played a role in the decision to keep Williams and Wilmore in space for a full crew rotation instead of bringing them back to Earth sooner.
“We talked a lot about when to re-spin them,” Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial group program manager, said at a news conference Friday. “When we look at the vehicles we have ready — and the planes — it made a lot of sense to re-spin them with Crew-9 and have two empty seats. Obviously, it’s not the right time for the Crew-8 vehicle to bring them back down.
He said NASA’s next mission for the space station will involve a new capsule.
“We can schedule it for a little while, but we have to have another vehicle ready. So when we worked with SpaceX, the next vehicle for Crew-10 is going to be around February, which is a brand new Dragon that we’re trying to get ready,” Stich said. We want to fly that dragon and take out the planes across the dragons. That’s why we’ll keep Butch and Chuni around for a little while longer.
Both Williams and Wilmore — veterans of previous missions to the space station — said they easily adjusted to the idea of staying in space until next year, with Williams referring to the microgravity environment as his “happy place.”
Crew members currently working on the International Space Station are NASA’s Don Pettit and Alexei Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. The trio arrived at the space station on September 11 aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle.
Pettit and Korbunov rode aboard a spacecraft built outside their home countries as part of a seat transfer agreement between NASA and its Russian partner.
