The Crew-9 mission arrived with only two astronauts at the International Space Station (ISS) on Sunday night, at 11:32 p.m. Spanish peninsular time, after taking off from Cape Canaveral (Florida, USA) on Saturday afternoon. . What was going to be a routine mission with four crew members has become something extraordinary. Due to problems with a Boeing Starliner spacecraft that had taken two other astronauts to the space station, NASA decided to leave them there until a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft – the one that just docked at the ISS – can bring them back to the space station. Earth, which is scheduled to happen in February 2025.
Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, the astronauts of the US space agency who traveled in June on the inaugural test flight of the Starliner ships – which was to remain only eight days on the ISS – are now part of the Crew mission. 9. It is the ninth of the commercial flight service that SpaceX has offered since 2020 to NASA to renew the crew of the International Space Station, which regularly carries four astronauts who spend six months there and return to earth after six months. The Starliner failure has completely altered those plans.
First, the mission, initially scheduled for August 18, was postponed due to the numerous small propulsion failures detected in the Starliner during its outbound trip to the ISS. Crew-9 had to wait for the return of the Boeing ship, which was postponed several times during the summer while the space agency and the aeronautical company analyzed the cause of the problems. Until at the end of August, NASA decided that Williams and Wilmore would stay at the station and the Starliner would return empty, amid strong tensions with Boeing.
Having to meet its return date in February 2025, Crew-9 has reduced its duration to just five months. And furthermore, in order to accommodate the astronauts trapped on the ISS on the return trip, it has had to reduce its crew on the way out, from four to two members. The American Nick Hague and the Russian Alexander Gorbunov kept their place, who entered the space station after 1:00 a.m. on Sunday. Two women stayed on the ground: Zena Cardman and Stephanie Williams, who were going to be the commander and mission specialist and now they will have to wait for a new opportunity to be able to meet the great challenge of spending six months working on the ISS.
The two astronauts from the original crew gave up their positions to Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who had already made long stays on the ISS before and did not plan on repeating the experience. Both have been integrated into the research and maintenance work of the orbital complex and, although they initially planned to spend only one week on the space station, they will ultimately spend eight months, if their return does not suffer further delays.
Despite Boeing’s insistence on bringing both astronauts back to its Starliner, the ship returned without a crew on September 7. It landed gently and without incident at the White Sands space base (New Mexico, USA); and, two days later, after analyzing all the data from the return flight, NASA admitted that Wilmore and Williams They would have arrived safely inside the space capsule: “If we had had a crew on board, we would have followed the same sequence of separation from the ISS, the same ignition of engines to deorbit the ship and executed the same reentry. So it would have been a safe and successful landing,” Steve Stich, director of NASA’s commercial human flight program, said at a press conference.
SpaceX rocket failure after launch
However, after tests carried out during the summer both on the Starliner and on the ground with engines identical to theirs, Boeing’s computer models – to simulate the degradation of the ship’s propellants during the return – did not completely convince the POT. The US space agency saw limitations and uncertainties in those models and considered that there could be too much risk for astronauts. After the return of the ship without problems, there was hope for Boeing to retain the program of regular commercial flights to the ISS with its Starliner ships. NASA should make public in the coming months the changes it requests from the company to avoid new problems and the date on which a Starliner could fly again. At the moment it is ruled out that it will do so before the summer of 2025, adding another year to the long list of project delays.
And at least until that date, SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace company, will continue to have no competitors in the private transportation service to the International Space Station that it offers to NASA. Although all human flights in Dragon capsules have been a success, in recent months there have been several minor problems with the Falcon 9 rockets that launch them. The last one was on Saturday: after the launch of the Crew-9 mission, the upper stage of the rocket – which is the one that gives the final push to the Dragon to place it in orbit – fulfilled its function correctly, but then it fell into the ocean outside the area that was planned for it. For this reason, SpaceX has decided to pause launches with Falcon 9 rockets until it knows why the failure occurred. It is the third time, in the last three months, that there has been a stoppage of these rockets, without which the private company cannot launch more Starlink satellites or manned missions.
Record of permanence in space
Today, the only alternative to Musk’s Dragon ships are the Russian Soyuz ships. In one of them, two Roscosmos cosmonauts, Nikolai Chub and Oleg Kononenko, returned to Earth a week ago, along with NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson. Chub and Kononenko have broken the record for the longest mission on the ISS, with 375 days; and adding them to those of his four previous stays, Kononenko has become the first person to spend more than 1,000 days in space.
With the departure of the Soyuz MS-25 with those three crew members, it officially began the 72nd expedition to the International Space Stationcommanded by Sunita Williams, one of the two Starliner astronauts who are no longer here trapped in space: they have their place back on a ship and, finally, your compatible spacesuit for the return. Until today they would have had to return without a suit in a Dragon ship, in case of emergency on the ISS.
Four other NASA officers and three Roscosmos cosmonauts stayed with them. Now, with the arrival of the American Hague and the Russian Gorbunov on the SpaceX Crew-9 mission, a total of 11 people live on the ISS. But it will only be for a few hours, until the Crew-8 mission returns to Earth this Monday or Tuesday with its four crew members. After that, after a summer of suspense and disrupted plans, the trip to the station for new astronauts is not scheduled until February 2025, who will be the ones to take over from the astronauts. trapped Williams and Wilmore and their two new companions who have just arrived.
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