Watch SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronaut mission arrive at the ISS today (Image Credit: Space.com)
SpaceX’s two-person Crew-9 mission will arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) today (Sept. 29), and you can watch the action live.
Crew-9’s Crew Dragon capsule, named Freedom, is scheduled to dock with the ISS today around 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT). You can watch the rendezvous live via NASA+ and the agency’s website, beginning at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT). Space.com will carry the feed as well, if NASA makes it available.
The coverage will continue through hatch opening and the ISS crew’s welcoming remarks, which are expected around 7:15 p.m. EDT (2315 GMT) and 7:40 p.m. EDT (2340 GMT), respectively.
Crew-9 launched Saturday afternoon (Sept. 28) from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov into orbit.
Related: SpaceX Crew-9 astronaut mission: Live updates
It was the first-ever human spaceflight to lift off from SLC-40. And Hague, who’s a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, became the first active member of that relatively new military branch to reach space.
Crew-9 is notable in another way as well. SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules usually ferry four people to the International Space Station, but NASA cut Crew-9’s astronaut manifest in half to save seats for two people already on the orbiting lab who need a ride home.
That duo — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — arrived at the ISS in June on the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Their mission was supposed to last just 10 days or so, but Starliner suffered thruster problems in orbit, and NASA extended the capsule’s stay at the ISS to study the issue.
The agency eventually decided that bringing Wilmore and Williams home on Starliner was too risky. So the capsule returned to Earth uncrewed on Sept. 7, and its former crew will come home on Freedom with Hague and Gorbunov when Crew-9 ends, in February 2025.
Wilmore and Williams are two of nine astronauts who are currently living aboard the ISS. The other seven are NASA’s Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps and Donald Pettit, and cosmonauts Alexander Grebenkin, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner.
Barratt, Dominick, Epps and Grebenkin came up with SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission in March. They will head back down to Earth not long after Crew-9 arrives, if all goes according to plan.
