SpaceX launched a ship to ‘rescue’ two astronauts stuck on the ISS

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon ship named Freedom takes the Crew-9 crew to the International Space Station (ISS), expected to dock with the ISS at around 9:30 p.m. on September 29 (Hanoi time).

Crew-9 departed on the afternoon of September 28 from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida, carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov goes into orbit. Crew-9 will perform about 200 scientific experiments during its time working on the ISS with the expectation of opening up new discoveries for humanity.

This was the first human space flight from SLC-40. Nick Hague, a colonel in the US Space Force, became the first member of this military branch to fly into space.

Normally, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon carries four people, but this time NASA reduced the number of astronauts to two to make room for the two people already on the station who needed to return to Earth, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.

These are the two astronauts who arrived at the ISS in June on the first human flight of Boeing’s Starliner. The mission was originally to last only 10 days, but due to Starliner experiencing thruster problems in orbit, NASA extended their stay on the ISS to study the problem.

Ultimately, NASA decided that returning Wilmore and Williams by Starliner was too risky. Therefore, Starliner returned to Earth without a pilot on September 7. The two astronauts will return with Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov aboard Freedom when the Crew-9 mission ends in February 2025.

Wilmore and Williams are two of nine astronauts currently living on the ISS. The remaining seven include NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps and Donald Pettit, and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Grebenkin, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner.