The SpaceX crew is charged with rescuing two astronauts who have remained stranded at the International Space Station, and it successfully docked at the orbiting laboratory on Sunday, according to a live stream of the mission.
The Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Saturday at 1:17 PM (1717 GMT). The Crew-9 mission, on a Dragon spacecraft, docked with the ISS on Sunday at 5:30 PM. After docking, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov entered the station shortly after 7:00 PM and warmly greeted their fellow colleagues.
“What a fabulous day it was today,” NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said during a news conference.
Hague and Gorbunov head to the ISS in February to return home with two space veterans, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. The stay aboard the station was extended for several months following some problems with their Boeing-designed Starliner spacecraft.
The Starliner -which was on its first crewed flight-launched Wilmore and Williams to the ISS in June on what was supposed to be an eight-day mission, but the flight ran into some problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system that forced NASA to alter its plans.
That was after weeks of extensive testing to determine Starliner’s reliability; at that point, NASA decided to send the spacecraft to Earth without its crew and instead prepared for the SpaceX Crew-9 mission to return the marooned astronauts home.
The SpaceX Company, owned by the billionaire Elon Musk, has been flying missions to the ISS every six months, its main objective being the rotation of the crew. Initially, the Crew-9 mission was scheduled for the middle of August but postponed to the end of September to give the NASA experts more time to assess the Starliner’s reliability. The launch needed to be delayed again due to weather on the Florida coast-hitting Hurricane Helene.
Altogether, Hague and Gorbunov are set to spend around five months on board the ISS, while Wilmore and Williams will stay for eight months. Some 200 scientific experiments are planned as part of the Crew-9 mission.
