SpaceX launches mission to bring back Starliner astronauts

Lifted by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, two astronauts left Earth on Saturday afternoon, headed to the International Space Station.

Such launches, taking a new complement of crew to the space station every six months or so, have become routine in the past few years, but this one was different.

Inside the Crew Dragon spacecraft atop the rocket, there were just two astronauts aboard — Nick Hague of NASA and Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia — instead of the usual four.

The other two seats were left empty to leave room for two other astronauts already on the space station — a shuffling of NASA’s plans caused by difficulties with a different spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner, over the summer.

Remnants of clouds and rain from Hurricane Helene passed over the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. But as the countdown ticked down, the bad weather cleared to allow the rocket to launch.

“Thankfully, we had a nice clear window in there,” Dana Hutcherson, deputy manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, said during a news conference after the launch. “We threaded a needle just perfectly.”

The Crew Dragon is scheduled to dock at the space station at 5:30 p.m. Sunday.

In June, two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, flew to the space station in a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner vehicle.

But problems with Starliner’s propulsion system led NASA officials to conclude that Williams and Wilmore should remain on the space station when Starliner returned to Earth this month.

Since 2020, SpaceX has been conducting regular flights taking astronauts to the space station for NASA.

Twice a year, a Falcon 9 rocket would launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, placing into orbit a Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard, who would join the space station crew.

About six months later, the same four astronauts would get back into the Crew Dragon and head home to Earth.

This mission, named Crew-9, would have done the same, but now this Crew Dragon will be the ride home for Williams and Wilmore.

That meant that two NASA astronauts slated for Crew-9, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, were bumped off.

“I can really relate to how they must be feeling, but we’ll fly them,” Ken Bowersox, associate administrator of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, said in an interview before the launch. “We’ll find them slots in the future.”

Cardman, Wilson, Hague and Gorbunov trained together for this mission for about a year and a half. Cardman was to serve as the Crew-9 commander, but this would have been her first spaceflight, while Hague made a trip to the space station in 2019.

On Saturday, instead of strapping into the Crew Dragon, Cardman provided commentary during the NASA coverage of the launch.

“It was hard not to watch that rocket lift off without thinking, ‘That’s my rocket, and that’s my crew,’” Cardman said, her voice cracking slightly.

But, she added that she was one of many people who contributed to the mission. “Makes me feel very proud,” Cardman said. “Makes me feel very connected to this mission that we all get to take part of.”

Bowersox acknowledged that the late changes for Crew-9 add some risk that something could go wrong.

“When the crew gets shuffled just a few weeks before the launch, you have to take some extra steps to make sure they’re trained for all of the technical things that they do during their mission,” Bowersox said. “There’s less margin if things start to go wrong, and so there’s risk there.”

There will also be some learning on the fly at the space station as Wilmore and Williams, who took over as commander of the space station this week, did not spend months training with Hague and Gorbunov. The four are to return to Earth in the Crew Dragon in February.

“Instead of knowing that the team can work well together before they launch, you take a little risk that they might have some bonding difficulties when they get to orbit,” Bowersox said.

Crew-9 also marked a change of launchpads.

Until now, all of SpaceX’s launches of astronauts occurred at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. SpaceX has also used a second launchpad in Florida at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, but that had only been used to launch satellites and space station cargo missions.

A couple of years ago, SpaceX decided to add a tower at its Cape Canaveral site that would allow astronauts to fly from there. SpaceX is also planning to launch — and land — its new giant Starship rocket from the Kennedy launchpad, and NASA officials had expressed worry that damage from a Starship mishap could leave SpaceX unable to launch the space station missions.

Cape Canaveral now provides a backup site and also adds flexibility to SpaceX’s launch plans, which include private astronaut missions.

The new capability “is a tremendous advantage and a nice tool to have in our toolbox that we’re going to use in pretty innovative and creative ways going forward,” said William Gerstenmaier, vice president for build and flight reliability at SpaceX.

Crew-9 was to have launched from the Kennedy Space Center, but it was moved because of delays — it could not launch until after Starliner departed and freed up a docking port — and the need to prepare this launchpad for next month’s launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper robotic mission to Jupiter.

For the SpaceX launches, astronauts have begun a tradition of signing their names on the wall in the preparation room at the end of the crew access arm just before they enter the Crew Dragon. Hague and Gorbunov continued the tradition, albeit on a pristine white surface.

“The first two of many,” Cardman said during the NASA broadcast.

Gorbunov’s seat on Crew-9 is part of the cooperation between NASA and Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation that runs the space program. The United States and Russia continue to work together in space despite tensions after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

NASA and Roscosmos trade seats on their spacecraft, part of the effort to make sure that astronauts are familiar with all of the systems on the space station.

Tracy Dyson of NASA just returned to Earth from the space station in a Soyuz following the launch of her colleague, Don Pettit, on a different Soyuz that brought up a new crew.