On Sunday, the SpaceX crew successfully docked with the International Space Station to rescue two stranded astronauts.
Gatekeepers News reports that the Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew-9 mission took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida on Saturday and made contact with the ISS on Sunday.
Following the docking, astronauts Nick Hague from NASA and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov boarded the station and joined their floating colleagues.
“I just want to say welcome to our new compadres from Dragon Freedom,” said station commander Suni Williams, one of the two stranded astronauts.
“Alex, welcome to the International Space Station, and Nick, welcome back home,” she said.
When Hague and Gorbunov return from the space station in February, they will bring back space veterans Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose stay on the ISS was prolonged for months due to problems with their Boeing-designed Starliner spacecraft.
The newly-developed Starliner was making its first crewed flight when it delivered Wilmore and Williams to the ISS in June 2024.
They were supposed to be there for only eight days, but after problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system emerged during the flight there, NASA was forced to weigh a radical change in plans.
After weeks of intensive tests on the Starliner’s reliability, the space agency finally decided to return it to Earth without its crew and to bring the two stranded astronauts back home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.
SpaceX, the private company founded by billionaire Elon Musk, has been flying regular missions every six months to allow the rotation of ISS crews.
However, the launch of Crew-9 was postponed from mid-August to late September to give NASA experts more time to evaluate the reliability of the Starliner and decide how to proceed.
It was then delayed a few more days by the destructive passage of Hurricane Helene, a powerful storm that roared into the opposite side of Florida on Thursday.
Hague and Gorbunov will spend some five months on the ISS. Wilmore and Williams will spend eight months there.
Crew-9 will conduct some 200 scientific experiments during their stay.
AFP
