SpaceX
NASA astronaut Nick Haag and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are set to launch Saturday from Florida's Space Coast aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, en route to a five-month expedition on the International Space Station.
The two-person crew will lift off atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at 1:17 p.m. EDT (5:17 UTC). The weather forecast is a bit iffy, with a 55 percent chance of favorable conditions for the launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. You can watch the launch on NASA's YouTube livestream, embedded here.
Empty chairs
This will be SpaceX's 15th crew mission since 2020, and SpaceX's 10th astronaut launch for NASA, but Saturday's launch is unusual in a number of ways.
“All of our missions have unique challenges and this one, I think, will be memorable for many of us,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA's associate administrator for space operations.
First, just two people will launch SpaceX's Crew Dragon into orbit Freedom spacecraft, instead of the usual four astronauts. This mission, known as Crew-9, originally included Haag, Gorbunov, Commander Zena Cardman and NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson.
But the troubled test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft threw a wrench in NASA's plans. The Starliner mission launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Boeing's spacecraft reached the space station, but thruster failures and helium leaks plagued the mission, and NASA officials decided last month that it was too risky to return to Earth as a crew on Starliner.
NASA selected SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 for billion-dollar commercial crew contracts, with each company responsible for developing human-rated spacecraft to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX flew astronauts for the first time in 2020, and Boeing reached the same milestone with the test flight that started in June.
Finally, the Starliner spacecraft returned safely to Earth on September 6 with a successful landing in New Mexico. But it left Wilmore and Williams on the space station with the laboratory's permanent crew of seven astronauts and cosmonauts. The space station crew has rigged two temporary foam seats into a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the outpost, where the Starliner astronauts would drive home if they needed to evacuate the complex in an emergency.
NASA/Kim Shiflett
This is a temporary measure to allow the Dragon spacecraft to return to Earth with six people instead of the usual four. NASA officials decided to remove two of the astronauts from the next SpaceX crew mission to free up regular seats for Wilmore and Williams to ride home in February, when Crew-9 was already set to end its mission.
The decision to fly the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without a crew had several second-order effects on space station operations. Managers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston had to decide who to cut from the Crew-9 mission and who to keep on the crew.
Nick Haag and Aleksandr Gorbunov ultimately retained their seats on the Crew-9 flight. Den Haag originally trained as a Crew-9 pilot, and now he will take Zena Cardman's place as commander. Hague, a 49-year-old Space Force colonel, is a veteran of a long-duration mission on the International Space Station and also suffered a rare in-flight launch failure in 2018 due to the failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket.
NASA announced the initial astronaut assignments for the Crew-9 mission in January. Cardman, a 36-year-old geobiologist, would have been the first novice astronaut with no experience as a test pilot to lead a NASA spaceflight. Three-time Space Shuttle aviator Stephanie Wilson, 58, was the other astronaut removed from the Crew-9 mission.
The decision on who would fly Crew-9 was “very close,” said Bowersox, who oversees NASA's space operations directorate. “They thought very hard about flying with Zena, but in this situation it made sense to have someone who had at least one flight under their belt.”
Gorbunov, a 34-year-old Russian aerospace engineer making his first flight into space, will take over the pilot's seat on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, although he will remain officially designated as a mission specialist. His remaining presence on the crew was predetermined due to an international agreement between NASA and the Russian Space Agency that provides seating for Russian cosmonauts on U.S. crew missions and U.S. astronauts on Russian Soyuz flights to the space station.
Bowersox said NASA will assign Cardman and Wilson to future flights.
Operational flexibility
This will also be the first launch of astronauts from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX's busiest launch pad. SpaceX has equipped the launch pad with the equipment needed to support launches of human spaceflight missions on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, including a more than 200-foot-tall tower and a crew access arm that will allow astronauts to board spaceships atop Falcon 9 rockets .
The SLC-40 was previously based on a “clean pad” architecture, without any structure for maintenance or access to Falcon 9 rockets while vertical on the pad. SpaceX also installed slides to give astronauts and ground crew an escape route away from the launch pad in an emergency.
SpaceX built the crew tower last year and prepared it for the launch of a Dragon cargo mission to the space station in March. Saturday's launch will demonstrate the pad's ability to support SpaceX astronaut missions, all of which previously took off from Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, a few miles north of SLC-40 .
By bringing human spaceflight launch capabilities online on the SLC-40, SpaceX and NASA will gain additional flexibility in their planning. For example, the LC-39A remains the only launch pad configured to support flights of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX is now preparing the LC-39A for an Oct. 10 Falcon Heavy launch on NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which has just a few weeks to leave Earth this year and reach its destination at Jupiter in 2030.
Now that the SLC-40 is certified for astronaut launches, SpaceX and NASA teams can support the Crew-9 and Europa Clipper missions without worrying about scheduling conflicts.
Earlier this week, Den Haag and Gorbunov took part in a dress rehearsal on launch day, where they had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the SLC-40. The launch pad has the same capabilities as the LC-39A, but with a slightly different layout. SpaceX also conducted a test of the Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday evening before lowering the rocket horizontally and returning it to a hangar for safekeeping as Hurricane Helene's outer bands passed through Central Florida.
Inside the hangar, SpaceX engineers discovered sooty exhaust from the Falcon 9 engines building up on the outside of the Dragon spacecraft during the test flight. Ground crews wiped the soot from the craft's solar panels and heat shield, then repainted parts of the capsule's radiators around the edge of Dragon's trunk.
“It's important that the radiators radiate heat into the room in the right way, so we had to apply some new paint to get that back to the right emissivity and the right reflectivity and absorbency of the solar radiation hitting the panels so that it reject heat appropriately,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX vice president for construction and flight reliability.
Gerstenmaier also outlined a new backup capability that would allow the Crew Dragon spacecraft to splash down safely even if all of its parachutes fail to deploy during the final descent back to Earth. This uses the capsule's eight powerful SuperDraco thrusters, normally only used in the unlikely event of a launch abort, to fire for a few seconds and slow Dragon's speed for a safe landing.
SpaceX
“The way it works is that in the event that all the parachutes fail completely, the thrusters are actually fired at the very end,” Gerstenmaier said. “That essentially gives the crew the opportunity to land safely and escape the vehicle. So it is not used in partial conditions. We can land with one parachute out. We could land with other malfunctions in the parachute system. But this is only in the case where all four parachutes simply don't work.”
When SpaceX first designed the Crew Dragon spacecraft more than a decade ago, the company wanted to use the SuperDraco thrusters to enable the capsule to perform propulsive helicopter-like landings. Ultimately, SpaceX and NASA agreed to move to a more conventional parachute-assisted splashdown.
The SuperDracos remained aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft to push the capsule away from the Falcon 9 rocket during a catastrophic launch failure. The eight powerful engines burn hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants that ignite when they come into contact with each other.
According to Gerstenmaier, the backup option has been activated for some previous commercial Crew Dragon missions. The capability “ensures an acceptable landing for the crew,” he added. “So it's a real, deep contingency. I think our philosophy is, instead of having a system that you don't use, even though it may not be fully certified, it gives the crew an opportunity to escape a very, very bad situation. .”
Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager, said emergency landing capabilities will be called in for the return of the Crew-8 mission, which has been on the space station since March. With the arrival of The Hague and Gorbunov with Crew-9 – and the extension of Wilmore and Williams' mission – the Crew-8 mission will leave the space station and splash down in early October.
